Hello and welcome to Simply Disability.
With a vested interest, our mission is to enable "choice and control" by making it simpler to navigate the government disability services sector. Our AI Assistant cuts down on the time it takes to get simple answers and reduces our/your reliance on ambiguous contradictory opinions. To further empower our users with information, all source documents are conveniently available within the platform for your reference and use.
Regardless of your context for getting to Simply Disability, we invite you to try the tools we've created and let us know how we can make them better for your needs.
Reach out to us via our contact page or by emailing info@simplydisability.com.au
"Simply Disability" is a passion project by Fun Parent out of Perth, Western Australia. As parents we are doing everything we can to give our kids every opportunity to thrive in a world full of inequity for people with a disability. Wading through oceans of information for simple answers is a profound pain. Our dedicated AI tool helps with this issue.
We started our journey with the NDIS in 2022 and quickly found ourselves trawling through policies, procedures and even the Act to get clear answers to our questions. With two young kids, getting through all the reading and making sense of what we were reading, took a lot of time. Along the way we found ourselves experiencing the adversarial face of a government with cost pressures. To meaningfully advocate for the needs and rites of our children, we needed to get through even more reading which put additional strain on our lives.
Some of the critical pain points for us were:
We needed a solution to save us time by serving us answers on demand without having to spend hours hunting. There is no substitute for context surrounding answers, but we needed something to point us to the location of the answers and then we could read the relevant information within the right source document and skip past the distracting preamble.
So we built a dedicated AI Assistant. We created a document repository containing most of the key documents we needed and then made it available to our AI Assistant. This allowed us to simply ask our questions to the assistant and it would zoom through all the documents and generate an answer based on what it had found. We refined it to include citations and references in its answers so that we could fact check the assistant as well as read the surrounding information to assure our understanding.
The technology that underpins the Simply Disability AI Assistant uses an advanced technique called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). It is a multistage process where your question is used to find likely related information from a database containing a collection of documents we have curated. The extracted content is then combined with a set of engineered instructions along with your question, and sent to a Large Language Model (LLM) service provider (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral AI) for inference. Their LLM interprets the supplied content based on our instructions to answer your question and then generates the response you see in our AI Assistant's chat window.
To refine the specificity and quality of LLM responses, our prompt engineering instructs the LLM to cite and reference wherever possible and to say "I don't know" when the supplied information does not contain an answer to your question. This comes as a trade off against being able to have long fluid conversations. LLM's have a limit to the amount of words that can be included in each prompt. As such only content related to your initial question is supplied and any follow-up questions will be answered using that information. To expand the scope again, you just need to start a new chat using the "new" button.
A key benefit of RAG over chatting with LLMs like ChatGPT directly, is a significant improvement in the quality of the responses that are generated. Responses are generated based on supplied information rather than invented based on whatever information the LLM was built with. This allows for responses that are much more specific, accurate and contextually relevant. RAG takes advantage of a LLMs ability to interpret information whilst limiting the scope of information that is used to generate a response.
None of what we have created would have been possible without our AI technology partner - YouAI. Their no-code platform Mind Studio was instrumental to the genesis of Simply Disability. With a mission to democratise access to AI technology, we can't recommend them enough. If you have any questions about what we've created, feel free to get in touch with us via our contact-us page.
We plan to expand the utility of our website and the AI Assistant in a few directions.
We are currently working to give AI Assistant access to other relevant & important documents related to the day to day responsibilities that come with managing a disability.
We also plan to expand the resources section to include links to community based groups and services. We're not sure what this will look like yet, but the idea is to make the headache of finding information and disability support a little easier for everyone.
If you have any feedback or ideas about how we can improve Simply Disability to better meet your needs, please let us know here.
Kind Regards,
Fun Parent
