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Euroconsumers

Vera, a legal assistant that has to be right

Vera answers consumer-rights questions for Altroconsumo and its sister organisations. A wrong answer about your rights is worse than no answer, so she looks things up rather than guessing, cites the article she answered from, marks her own confidence, and hands anything risky to a person. I built the environments it runs on and kept it running after launch, with their teams in Portugal, France and Italy.

Everything here is arranged around not being confidently wrong.

Vera looks things up before she answers rather than reciting from memory, and every answer carries the article it came from, so a member can check her. Sources show their publication date, because a consumer-rights article that was right two years ago may not be now. Ingestion had to be rebuilt around how long real legal documents actually take to process, rather than how long we had assumed.

Then the unglamorous half, which is what actually decides whether people trust it. Prices that parse correctly in every market. Translations for every surface. A refusal to answer what the sources cannot support, and a human in the loop on anything carrying real risk.

PortugalFranceItalyTeams in Portugal, France and Italy

Where it landed

100% cited

answers traceable to their source articles

3 markets

Portugal, France and Italy

Human review

for answers carrying real risk

What it taught me

Knowing when to say nothing is a feature. Vera is more useful for refusing a question her sources cannot support than she would be for answering everything fluently. An answer you can check beats one you have to take on faith, and most of that trust was won in the dull places: dated sources, prices that parse, a person on anything risky.