Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask His Majesty's Government what initial assessment they have made of the effectiveness of their artificial intelligence tool 'Humphrey'; and on average, how much time per day it saves users of the technology.

The ‘Humphrey’ toolkit announced in January refers to a series of prototypes developed by the Incubator for AI to enhance civil servant productivity and improve government processes.

The Incubator has released an evaluation of Consult, a tool to analyse consultation responses, used in a live consultation with the Scottish government. Evaluation showed reviewing Consult’s themes is quick, with a median time of 23s per response. By reducing analysis time, Consult freed up time to focus on the implications.

In testing, Minute, an AI transcription tool, reduced the time taken to complete minutes for a 60 minute meeting by one hour, which users reallocated to more critical tasks.

Parlex, a suite of AI tools to analyse parliamentary developments, is still in early-stage user testing.

Testing with 282 users of Redbox, a tool to provide secure access to LLMs, suggested time savings for 89% of users. For the 269 survey participants who flagged the task they used Redbox most on, the median time saving on this task was 2 hours per week.

The Incubator for AI will be publishing upcoming evaluation results on AI.GOV.UK and via the new AI Knowledge Hub.