GovCompanion
A grounded RAG assistant covering 113+ government services in Sinhala and English — verified fees, documents, and steps, so citizens stop losing hours to fragmented portals.
govcompanion-lk.vercel.appLive demo
GovCompanion
A bilingual AI that walks Sri Lankans through their own government.
The Problem
Renewing a passport, getting a NIC, transferring a vehicle — in Sri Lanka the information for these lives across dozens of government sites, in three languages, rarely consistent, and almost never in one place. People take a day off work, travel to an office, and find they brought the wrong document.
GovCompanion exists to answer the practical question before you leave home: what do I bring, what does it cost, where do I go, and in what order? — in the language you actually speak.
An AI that invents a government fee is worse than no AI. Grounding wasn't a feature here; it was the entire point.
The System
A retrieval-augmented assistant sits over a structured knowledge base of services. Each answer is grounded in verified records — documents, fees, office locations, steps — rather than a model's memory, and answers carry source chips linking back to the official portal (drp.gov.lk, immigration.gov.lk) so a citizen can verify before they act.
Fig. 1 — Grounded answer path with four-provider fallback.
The Build
Bilingual support isn't a translate button bolted on the end — Sinhala and English are first-class query and answer paths, because the citizen who most needs this guidance is often the one least served by English-only government UX.
The Proof
The site is live on its own domain for a country of 22 million. Twenty services are fully verified against official sources at launch, with the knowledge base structured to grow the rest without re-architecting.
Margin Notes
- What's honest about it: 113 services are indexed; 20 are fully source-verified today. The knowledge model tracks that distinction rather than pretending everything is gold.
- What I'd redo: verification is manual per service. The next version needs a change-detection pass on the source portals so a fee update upstream flags the record as stale automatically.
- What shipped anyway: the four-provider fallback. It's the difference between a demo that works when you present it and a public tool that works when someone actually needs a passport.
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