IntelliCast 2.0 — Advanced Agentic Political Chatbot

Author: Ehtesham Siddiqui

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Executive Summary

IntelliCast 2.0 is a production-quality, agentic political chatbot designed for advanced reasoning, strict neutrality, and real-time factuality. It leverages OpenAI’s GPT-4, aggregates data from multiple APIs and authoritative sources, and enforces principled boundaries. Each session maintains its own persistent memory profile, enabling context-rich, multi-turn conversations with robust bias mitigation and multi-perspective analysis. The system is engineered for reliability, transparency, and compliance with best practices in political information delivery.

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Features

• Strict Neutrality: Enforces unbiased, factual answers with both Republican and Democratic perspectives where relevant.
• Principled Boundaries: Uses an LLM-based YES/NO classifier to strictly refuse non-political questions with a fixed message (no sources shown).
• Real-Time Information Retrieval: Aggregates up-to-date data from NewsAPI, The Guardian, Serper, Brave, Congress, FEC, and scrapes Wikipedia/White House for authoritative facts.
• Multi-Perspective Analysis: Always presents multiple viewpoints on partisan or controversial issues.
• Session Memory: Each chat session has its own persistent memory and conversation history, supporting context-rich, multi-turn interactions.
• Advanced Prompt Engineering: System prompt enforces neutrality, disables LLM-generated sources, and includes the last 4 turns of conversation for continuity.
• Bias Mitigation: After each answer, the LLM self-reflects for bias and revises if needed.
• Citations & Confidence: Only URLs actually referenced in the answer are cited at the bottom; every answer includes a confidence score.
• Modern Web UI: Responsive, ChatGPT-style interface with sidebar, chat bubbles, and persistent chat history.
• API Integration: Modular design makes it easy to add or swap data sources.

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Setup

1. Install dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt
   

2. Create a .env file with your API keys:

   OPENAI_API_KEY=your_openai_key_here
   NEWS_API_KEY=your_newsapi_key_here
   GUARDIAN_API_KEY=your_guardian_key_here
   BRAVE_API_KEY=your_brave_key_here
   CONGRESS_API_KEY=your_congress_key_here
   FEC_API_KEY=your_fec_key_here
   SERPER_API_KEY=your_serper_key_here
   

   Only the keys you provide will be used. The more you add, the richer the answers.

3. Run the chatbot (web UI):

   python app.py
   

   Then open http://localhost:5000 in your browser.

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Usage

Web Interface

• Start a new chat, switch between sessions, or delete old ones from the sidebar.
• Ask any political, government, or public policy question — the bot will answer with both perspectives, sources, and a confidence score.
• The bot will strictly refuse non-political questions with a fixed message and no sources.
• Click "Summarize" to get a quick overview of any session.
• All your chats are saved and can be revisited anytime.

CLI (for advanced users)

• You can also run the CLI version:

  python main.py
  

• Use history to see your conversation, summary for stats, and quit to exit.

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.env Example

OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
NEWS_API_KEY=...
GUARDIAN_API_KEY=...
BRAVE_API_KEY=...
CONGRESS_API_KEY=...
FEC_API_KEY=...
SERPER_API_KEY=...

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Project Structure

• app.py — Flask backend for the web UI
• main.py — CLI version (optional)
• politics_bot.py — Core agentic chatbot logic (neutrality, bias/citation checks, session memory)
• news_sources.py — API clients for news/search/government data
• topic_classifier.py — LLM-based classifier for political queries
• settings.py — Loads config and API keys
• static/ — CSS and JS for the web UI
• templates/ — HTML for the web UI

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Troubleshooting & Tips

• If you get "Invalid session" errors, try refreshing the page or starting a new chat.
• If answers seem limited, check your .env for missing or expired API keys.
• For best results, provide as many API keys as possible.
• The bot will politely refuse non-political questions (e.g., "What's the weather?").
• All code and UI are written and organized by me, Ehtesham Siddiqui.

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Personal Notes

This project is a showcase of advanced prompt engineering, agentic reasoning, API integration, and user-friendly AI tool design. If you have feedback or want to extend the bot with more sources or features, feel free to reach out!