Cal Poly DxHub and Alameda County Deploy AI Assistant to Demystify Property Tax Regulations and Streamline Assessor Operations
Overview
The Cal Poly Digital Transformation Hub (DxHub), powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), collaborated with the Alameda County Assessor’s Office to revolutionize how citizens and staff interact with complex property tax regulations. This innovative project leveraged generative AI to create an intelligent chatbot that simplifies access to and understanding of California’s property tax codes and assessment processes. By combining advanced AI technology with comprehensive regulatory documents, the solution helps citizens and staff quickly find citable answers to complex tax questions while a bonus feature points recommends citizens to exemption forms specific to their case. This improves citizen experience while reducing staff workload and improving training efficiency.
Problem
The property assessment process involves navigating the California Assessor’s Handbook, thousands of pages of complex regulations, tax codes, and legal documents – a challenging task for both citizens and Assessor’s Office staff. Citizens frequently struggle to understand tax regulations and often require direct assistance from assessors to interpret rules or identify appropriate exemption forms. This creates a significant operational burden on staff who must repeatedly field similar questions while managing other critical responsibilities like property tax appeals. Additionally, training new assessors requires substantial time investment to master the extensive regulatory framework, while existing search tools make finding specific information in regulatory documents inefficient and time-consuming.
Innovation In Action
The DxHub team developed a cutting-edge solution that transforms how users interact with property tax information. The AI-powered assistant leverages natural language processing to seamlessly search and synthesize answers from multiple regulatory sources, including the California Assessors’ Handbook, Tax and Revenue Codes, and Letters to Assessor documents.
The solution provides fully transparent, citable responses where users can trace every answer back to its source document and specific page number, ensuring accuracy and building trust. When regulatory tables or charts are relevant to a query, the system automatically extracts and displays them as images within the chat interface, complete with source attribution.
A particularly powerful feature is the intelligent exemption form finder. Using a dynamically generated decision tree based on regulatory requirements, the system guides users through a series of targeted yes/no questions about their circumstances, ultimately recommending the most appropriate exemption form for their situation. To promote widespread adoption, the team developed an easy-to-deploy cloud development kit that enables other California assessor’s offices to implement and customize the solution for their jurisdictions while leveraging the same core regulatory knowledge base.
Technical Solution
The application leverages several AWS managed services to ensure scalability, security, and performance. Amazon OpenSearch Serverless serves as the foundation for the vector embedding knowledge base, enabling sophisticated semantic search capabilities across the regulatory document corpus. The team built a scalable serverless backend using AWS Lambda to extract and ingest all of the contents of the CA Assessors Handbook into an Amazon OpenSearch Serverless vector database. Amazon Textract powers the automatic identification and extraction of tables and charts from regulatory documents. Amazon Titan Text v2 was used for the vector embeddings. The system also leverages Amazon Bedrock and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model to provide natural language understanding and generation capabilities for the user interactions. The architecture ensures that all user data and generated content are processed securely within the AWS ecosystem, maintaining the privacy and confidentiality required for the county’s users.
Next Steps
Alameda County is currently piloting the solution internally and coordinating with other California Assessor’s offices to evaluate its effectiveness and gather feedback for future improvements.
Supporting Documents
| Source Code | All of the code and assets developed during the course of creating the prototype. |
| Architect Diagram | A diagram that describes the technical components needed to implement the solution. |
About the DxHub
The Cal Poly Digital Transformation Hub (DxHub) is a strategic relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is the world’s first cloud innovation center supported by AWS on a University campus. The primary goal of the DxHub is to provide students with real-world problem-solving experiences by immersing them in the application of proven innovation methods in combination with the latest technologies to solve important challenges in the public sector. The challenges being addressed cover a wide variety of topics including homelessness, evidence-based policing, digital literacy, virtual cybersecurity laboratories and many others. The DxHub leverages the deep subject matter expertise of government, education, and non-profit organizations to clearly understand the customers affected by public sector challenges and develop solutions that meet the customer needs.