Notarization with Intelligent Virtual Assistant with Blockchain and PLN technologies (NAVIRO)

Context

 

Councilbox Technology will research and develop in this project the technologies that will provide a prototype for companies that need to hold corporate meetings and shareholders’ meetings supported by online or face-to-face meetings with electronic evidence and a notarization system, minimizing the bureaucratic burden and facilitating the response to doubts and questions with recommendations.

The experimental prototype called “Notarization with Intelligent Virtual Assistant with Blockchain and PLN technologies (NAVIRO)” will be implemented based on the development of new systems supported on Blockchain and Natural Language Processing; providing, among others, the following basic functionalities:

  • Meeting administrators or managers will be able to interact with an intelligent virtual notary through a voice and text chat window to obtain information about past meetings and resolve certain legislation-related questions. In addition, the system will improve their behaviour through various feedback mechanisms.
  • The intelligent virtual notary will transcribe through STT techniques the public audio of the meetings, generate summaries and identify the topics discussed automatically. The information generated from the transcripts will be used to expand the knowledge base of the system.
  • The virtual notary will generate blockchain evidence of the most relevant events of the meetings, such as, for example, the start of a meeting or the casting of a vote. It will also generate evidence of its interactions with users and of the information it generates itself (transcripts, summaries, etc.).

The implementation of NAVIRO technology (Notarization with Intelligent Virtual Assistant with blockchain and PLN technologies) will open up new markets and possibilities. Technological security, trust and scalability are the pillars and primary concerns of major global businesses. Entities such as banking, public administration or the legal sector need to protect the integrity of the data shared in these meetings.

To date, no company is known to offer a notarization system with an intelligent assistant (virtual notary) based on blockchain electronic evidence for online and face-to-face meetings.

 

Objectives

 

The Notarization system proposed in this project will provide a disruptive solution in the market because it will include a tool to hold corporate meetings (online and/or face-to-face) with legal validity, integrating AI and intelligent notarization.

The objectives of the project are:

  • Design of the overall system architecture.
  • The conversational system (Virtual Notary) allows interaction through text and voice, providing answers on static knowledge bases (limited knowledge on a subset of Spanish law) and on dynamic knowledge bases (information related to previous meetings).
  • The conversational system is able to improve its response in future interactions through continuous learning from user feedback.
  • Interaction with the “virtual notary” can be done through text and voice via an executable web interface in a browser.
  • The “Intelligent Virtual Notary” is able to transcribe and process the audio of meetings, expanding its knowledge base.
  • The “virtual notary” generates blockchain evidence of the main events of meetings, audio, video, transcripts and other derived information, and of the notary’s interactions with users.
  • Experimental prototype available for proof of concept.

Through the so-called “virtual notary” system, based on artificial intelligence and blockchain, users of the final product will be able to access, quickly, easily and with electronic evidence, the resolution of doubts and the retrieval of information. The assistant will be able to hold basic conversations, provide relevant information about previous meetings and answer basic questions about a relevant subset of Spanish law. In addition, the virtual notary will be able to be present as a listener at the meeting, generating an automated transcript of the meeting in the background. It will detect the most relevant topics of the meeting and generate a summary of the meeting. In addition, it will detect important events during the course of the meeting such as the start of the meeting, opening of votes, list of connected participants, etc. For such events, the notary will generate blockchain evidence unattended and digitally sign it. Once generated, not even the trusted third party will be able to question their existence or origin. It will also generate evidence of its interactions with users and the information it generates automatically (transcripts, summaries, etc.).

All these innovative functionalities are currently not available in any known system and imply a clear technological breakthrough that is not possible to achieve with existing technologies on the market.

 

Degree of innovation

 

The Notarisation system proposed in this project will provide a disruptive solution in the market because it will include a tool to hold corporate meetings (online and/or face-to-face) with legal certainty, integrating AI and smart notarisation.

The proposed solution is positioned as a tool with global reach, allowing access to new markets without having to change the main features of the tool.

The following technological advances will be made available as a result of this project:

  • Global cloud architecture.
  • Audio to text transcription model.
  • Intelligent conversational system.
  • Advanced web interface of the notary.
  • Massive and low-cost evidence generation system.
  • Electronic evidence retrieval system for verification.
  • API’s for the interconnection of the different modules.
  • Pre-processing of meeting transcripts.
  • Automatic summary model.
  • Word extraction model.
  • Model for automatic generation of questions and answers.
  • Thematic extraction model.
  • Experimental prototype that will allow a proof of concept to be carried out.

 

Lines of development

 

At the functional level, the intelligent virtual notary is conceived as a development with three different sections and their respective functionalities:

  • Transcript generation and processing

It brings together the artificial intelligence models necessary to transcribe the audio of the meetings in Spanish and to obtain information from them, such as summaries and relevant topics. Additionally, digitally signed blockchain evidences will be generated for all the information generated by this module (transcription, meeting topics and summaries).

  • System with text and voice interaction

It is the module in charge of managing the conversation with the user for the retrieval of context-relevant information, interpretation and response to questions from a knowledge base.

  • Notarisation through blockchain evidence generation

In order to be able to generate blockchain evidence in the face of massive and variable volumes of requests, it is necessary to manage an own blockchain network. This is not possible in other general open blockchain networks, where desirable properties of the data stored there (such as immutability and timestamping) are guaranteed in a robust way, both due to technical limitations of the networks and economic constraints (writing to them is expensive). In order to be able to grant properties such as immutability and timestamping to the evidence generated in a proprietary blockchain network, it is necessary to consolidate them from time to time in a blockchain network that does offer these guarantees.

 

Milestones achieved

 

The following results were achieved during 2022:

Analysis:

  • State of the art study on AI and blockchain.
  • Requirements for the overall architecture, the care system, the scalability of the overall system, the blockchain notarisation system and the transcription system.
  • Preliminary description of the proof of concept.

Design:

  • Choice of technologies for building AI models and the care system.
  • Design of the transcript generation and processing modules, the Care System module, the blockchain evidence generation and retrieval system.
  • Scalable global architecture design.

Important milestones in the project were reached in the first quarter of 2023:  

Analysis:

  • Full study of different models to generate questions and answers in an automated way, including from meeting transcripts, testing different alternatives such as Bloom or TF-IDF.  

Design and development:

  • Finalisation of the models that allow the automatic retrieval of topics and key words from the meetings. 
  • Scalable Blockchain evidence generation module, as well as the system’s user interface. 
  • Start of work to produce the prototype needed to carry out a proof of concept.