BillTrack50 Help Center

Bills can often be complex and difficult to follow, and can use a lot of technical or legal language. Often, the state will provide a short summary and we include these on the Summary tab of the bill page and as a bill sheet column. Not all bills have a summary, however, and not all of these summaries actually explain what the bill does.

To make it easier to quickly understand legislation, we have used an AI tool to summarize all bills that are from sessions that were active in 2017 or later. The AI has looked at the title, state provided summary and bill text to produce a short, simple, plain English summary.

The AI summaries are available on bill pages but also as a column option for bill sheets. They have been included in the Default Standard bill sheet template for any accounts created from April 2024 and later. If you have an account created earlier than that, then you can change the columns in your template by going to the Bill Sheet Templates menu. See this post for how to create and edit templates.

The bill sheet displays one line of the summary. To see the full summary for a bill, click on the summary and it will expand to show you the full text. Press the [SPACE] bar to shrink it back down to one line.

The summaries can be included in sharing tools such as map widgets and stakeholder pages, as well as reports and exports. They are also included in the API.

How Accurate are the Summaries?

We extensively tested this function before introducing it and we are very pleased with the accuracy of the AI generated text. We cannot guarantee, however, that every summary will be completely accurate and comprehensive so you should continue to read the bill text thoroughly for bills that are important to you.

What Happens When a Bill Changes?

We will automatically generate a new summary each time a new version of a bill is published. So the summary should always be up to date.