The Challenge
UK parliamentary committees set the agenda for regulation across every major industry—financial services, healthcare, energy, technology, and more. For public affairs professionals and government relations teams, staying across those proceedings is not optional; it is the job.
The practical reality is punishing. Dozens of select committees and standing committees sit simultaneously across any given parliamentary week. Each session can run three to five hours. Relevant policy signals—a minister's offhand comment on regulatory timelines, a committee chair's line of questioning signalling future scrutiny, a backbench amendment being workshopped in public—are buried inside hours of proceedings that no team has the capacity to watch in full.
Traditional monitoring services offered next-day summaries at best. By the time a briefing landed in an inbox, the window to respond had often already closed.
Our Solution
XY Space designed and built the backend infrastructure powering Ziani.ai, a purpose-built parliamentary intelligence platform for UK public affairs professionals. The architecture was built around a single constraint: intelligence is only valuable if it arrives in time to act on it.
Live audio ingestion and transcription — The system continuously monitors official parliamentary audio streams across all major UK select committees and standing committees. As sessions go live, audio is captured and fed through a speech-to-text pipeline tuned specifically for parliamentary proceedings—handling the formal register of committee questioning, technical legislative language, proper nouns for ministers and officials, and the overlapping speech patterns of committee debate. Transcription accuracy runs at 95%+ across standard proceedings.
Policy signal extraction — Raw transcripts are processed in real time by NLP models trained on parliamentary language, Hansard records, and sector-specific regulatory terminology. The system does not simply keyword-match. It identifies the context around a mention—whether a topic is being raised critically, endorsed, referred to for future action, or dismissed—and weighs that against each client's defined interest profile.
Client-specific relevance scoring — Each client configures the sectors, legislation, companies, and policy areas they need to track. When the AI detects a discussion that crosses a relevance threshold for a given client, it generates a structured summary: the committee, the speaker, the timestamp, the verbatim excerpt, and a concise interpretation of why it matters. This is what gets sent—not a raw transcript dump.
Multi-channel alert delivery — Alerts are dispatched via email, SMS, or direct API integration into the client's existing CRM or government relations workflow, typically within minutes of the relevant exchange occurring in committee. Teams that previously learned about key developments from the morning press briefing are now briefed before the session has finished.
Technical Architecture
The platform handles multiple concurrent audio streams without degradation, a non-trivial infrastructure challenge during busy parliamentary periods when several committees sit in parallel. The speech-to-text layer applies a custom language model fine-tuned on Hansard transcripts and parliamentary procedural language, which materially improves accuracy over general-purpose transcription on the specialist vocabulary that matters most to public affairs clients.
The NLP extraction layer is built to be client-configurable without engineering intervention—account managers can update a client's interest profile through an internal dashboard, and the relevance scoring adjusts immediately. This matters in practice: public affairs briefs change as bills progress, and the platform needs to keep pace with a client's evolving priorities across a parliamentary session.
All transcripts, summaries, and alert records are stored with full source attribution—committee name, session date, speaker identity, and timestamp—so clients can cite the record directly in briefings, consultations, and board reports.
Impact
Public affairs teams using Ziani.ai report a qualitative shift in how they work. The platform does not replace the expertise of experienced government relations professionals—it removes the surveillance burden so that expertise can be applied where it counts: interpretation, relationship management, and strategic response.
Coverage that previously required a team member assigned to each committee is now handled automatically. Niche proceedings that would previously go unmonitored—a sub-committee session on a technical amendment, a one-off evidence session with a regulator—are captured with the same completeness as high-profile hearings. Clients consistently cite the ability to respond to policy developments within the same parliamentary session as the most significant operational change the platform has delivered.
Ziani.ai currently monitors all major UK select committees and standing committees, with coverage expanding as parliamentary scheduling demands.