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Meet Humphrey, a suite of AI tools by the UK government to aid public servants

The batch of AI tools to support UK government personnel has been named after a character in the British television series ‘Yes, Minister’.

Illustration shows a laptop with binary codes displayed in front of the UK flag in this illustration taken, August 19, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

The UK government is developing a new set of AI tools called ‘Humphrey’ to help speed up the work of civil servants in the country.

While still in its nascent stages, the project is aimed at reducing the daily workload of civil servants by essentially using generative AI to read and process vast amounts of data.

“It will do away with insensitive and antiquated processes that have been holding this country back for too long. That means scrapping the need for people to queue at the local council to register the death of a loved one – getting in the way of growth,” the UK government said in a press release on Tuesday, January 21.

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The batch of AI tools to aid government workers in the UK has been named after a fictional character in the popular British political satire sitcoms ‘Yes, Minister’ and ‘Yes, Prime Minister’.

Humphrey is being developed by the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and will be made available to all government employees soon, with a few AI tools becoming accessible from Tuesday onwards, as per the press release.

What is Humphrey?

The suite of AI tools that form Humphrey include the following:

– Consult: An AI tool capable of summarising “thousands” of public responses submitted via stakeholder consultations.
– Parlex: An AI chatbot that can be used by government employees to ask for and receive information related to bills or other policy documents tabled in the Parliament.
– Minute: An AI-based transcription service to take notes from meetings.
– Redbox: An AI tool designed to summarise policies and help government employees prepare briefings.
– Lex: An AI research tool to help officials analyse, summarise, and understand relevant laws.

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The introduction of Humphrey comes a week after British Prime Minister Keir Starmer laid out sweeping plans to make the UK an AI hub by accelerating planning permission to build data centres and giving them energy connections, according to a report by Reuters.

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The Labour government is also looking to roll out more AI-based services in the public sector such as the country’s publicly funded National Health Service (NHS). Though, most of these AI initiatives are currently in the charter stage.

The DSIT is looking to save over £45 billion annually by automating various tasks using AI. The government body said that it currently spends around £23 billion every year on technology. It remains to be seen whether this amount will be enough to cover the cost of building and deploying AI services.