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. 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, including bills from historical sessions in our database. The AI has looked at the title, state provided summary and bill text to produce a short, simple, plain English summary.

Resolutions and memorials have not been summarized. All new bills will get a summary as they are introduced, and the summary will be recreated for each new version of the bill.

Each summary has a Report AI Issue link, which you can use to report any summaries which you think are inaccurate. Please do report any problems, we want the summaries to be as accurate as possible.

In accordance with BillTrack50's mission to make democracy more democratic by helping people participate in the legislative process, we have made the AI generated summaries available for everybody who views a bill page - you don't have to have a paid subscription or even a free account.

Bill Sheets and API

The AI summaries are also available 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 AI summaries are available in our API for your use. See the API documentation for more information.

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.

What's Next?

We have introduced a feature which will suggest similar bills to bills already in a bill sheet, to make it easier to find relevant bills. We have also added a feature that will suggest similar bills based on the contents of a bill sheet.

If you find summaries that are inaccurate or misleading, then please let us know. And we'd also love to hear any suggestions you have for other uses of AI to make BillTrack50 even better.