Dex goes everywhere: Telegram, Teams and our biggest autumn yet

Telegram turns Dex from a website you visit into an assistant you talk to. Link your account once and Dex messages you when the TDs you follow vote, ask a question or speak. Reply to any update to ask what it means.

Alerts and Dex used to be two separate things: alerts came to your inbox, and Dex lived on the website. In Telegram they are one conversation. The alert starts the thread, and Dex is right there in it, already knowing which vote or debate you are looking at.

Updates that land close together arrive as one message, and nothing is sent between 21:00 and 08:00 Irish time. While the beta runs there is no daily limit on alerts, so a busy day in the Dáil reaches you in full.

• Dex follows the conversation. Reply to one of its answers and it knows which answer you mean. Ask "did she support the amendment?" and it carries on from the vote you were just discussing.
• Corrections and edits just work. Say "No, I meant IPAS" and Dex fixes its answer instead of starting over. Edit a message and the answer updates. Send two messages while Dex is still writing and it folds them into one reply.
• A thank-you is just a thank-you. Dex gives it a thumbs-up and does not spend one of your daily questions on it.
• Buttons for the next question. Every answer offers a simpler version, a deeper one, and As Gaeilge or In English. Updates have their own, like how others voted, what the answer was, or what happens next.
• Sources you can check. Dex only cites pages it actually found, and numbers its sources to match.
• No more silent waiting. Dex shows when it is typing, and a short line says what it is checking, such as "Checking the vote record". The line disappears when the answer arrives.
• /news, /week and /today. The latest DáilDex stories, what your TDs did this week, and what is on in the Oireachtas today. /news is free and does not use a Dex message.
• Change your alerts by saying so. "Only votes from now on." "Follow Holly Cairns." "Pause until Monday." Dex works out the change and shows a Confirm button. Nothing changes until you tap it.

Set up Dex on Telegram · How Dex on Telegram works

You can now talk to Dex, or show it something instead of typing it out.

Send a voice note and it is transcribed, with a flag where Dex may have misheard a name. Send a photo of a letter, a screenshot of a post or a scanned PDF of up to ten pages, and Dex reads it and tells you what it says, checks a claim in it, or answers your question about it. A screenshot followed by "what does that mean?" is treated as one question, and an album of photos is read together.

We do not keep your files. Voice notes go to a transcription service chosen because it does not retain what it hears.

Dex now greets you by name and picks up where you left off.

If you share something worth remembering, such as the issue you care most about, Dex offers to keep a short note and saves it only when you tap Confirm. Type /memory to see every note and forget any of them. Civic memory is now a switch on both the website and Telegram, so you can turn it off and delete it all.

Dex never offers to remember anything about health, religion, sexuality, ethnicity, trade union membership or party support. And if you have been given a personal note from the team, you will now see it at the top of your Dex settings.

When news is moving, minutes matter.

When several updates land close together, Dex bundles them into one message. That window is now two minutes instead of ten, so news from the chamber reaches you much sooner.

Dex on Telegram now answers with Mercury 3 by default, for everyone. If you are on Dex Pro, you can also choose Claude Haiku 5.5 or Mistral Large 4.0: type /model, or just say "use Mistral". Your choice is remembered.

Until 1 January 2027, Telegram also gives you three times your usual daily questions, explainers and weekly uploads, and while your account is linked to Telegram you keep three times your plan's watches. The website's daily limits are unchanged. Type /help to see what you have left.

Ask Dex for something visual and it can build one.

Ask for a walkthrough of how a bill becomes law, a timeline, a quiz or a count of how the single transferable vote works, and Dex builds an explainer and saves it to your DáilDex library. Type /saved to open your latest. Some are written in advance from the Constitution, so they appear almost instantly.

Explainers are rolling out to Telegram now, with three a day on the free plan and twelve with Pro.

Following a person is useful. Following an issue is better.

You can now follow a topic across every TD at once: a planning bill, school places, a hospital waiting list. Follow it once and you see what each TD says and does about it. It works alongside following individual TDs and constituencies, and the follow page now points you to it.

Watch alerts show what you asked about, in your own words, so you always remember why one arrived. Watches are free for the first three, and Dex Pro raises that to 25.

Briefs, a short summary on your schedule, no longer have to arrive on Telegram. They can come by email, by phone notification, or both, and every email has a one-click stop link.

For organisations that need to watch the legislative agenda, we also added legislative monitoring with opt-in email digests.

Following the Oireachtas is part of many jobs, and plenty of classrooms.

We launched plans for teams and schools. The new Teams page has a seat calculator, a clear description of what each plan includes and a short enquiry form, so you can tell us what you need and how you would like to connect it.

A custom Dex on Telegram is now an option for organisations too, so a team can follow its issues together in a chat it already uses. We made a launch film to go with it.

Dex Pro now lists Telegram among what it includes, and the Pro page leads with what you get rather than a list of features.

See Teams and schools plans

Dex can now be built into other tools.

We introduced the Dex API on our developer site, with a pilot answers endpoint and access that connects to your signed-in account, so you can try it without a separate sign-up. Read more in the post that introduces it.

Read about the Dex API · Developer site

Plain-English guides are some of the most-read pages on DáilDex.

We added new bilingual guides to Irish politics and policy, in English and Irish, including how to teach Irish politics with DáilDex. Four more landed in October, and we rechecked every time-sensitive claim in them against current sources.

Every blog post now has a reading progress bar and, on a wide screen, an On this page list that follows you down the article and tells you how many minutes are left. Body text is larger and easier on the eye. Guide pages also stopped stretching past the screen on phones.

There is a new page for campus ambassadors, for students who want to help spread the word at their college.

Browse the Learn guides

Most people find civic information through search before they find us.

DáilDex pages now load several times faster, which helps most on a phone or a slow connection. They are also easier for search engines and AI assistants to read in full, so people searching for a TD, a minister or a vote find us sooner.

• Minister pages that answer the question. Search for who holds a ministry and you now get a direct answer, with their Ministers of State, their department and the common questions.
• Clearer TD titles. TD pages now say which office the TD holds, such as Minister for Agriculture, not just Minister.
• Recent votes on party and constituency pages. See how a party, or a constituency's TDs, actually voted lately, in plain tables.
• Films that play in search. Pages with a film now describe it properly, so it can appear in video results.
• Honest dates. Our sitemap reports when pages really changed, and pages that are still in English are no longer offered as Irish translations.

A lot of this month was making the basics better.

The homepage now has a Right now band showing the latest news, the latest vote and what is happening in your area. News groups several reports of the same development under one card. Vote share cards are richer, and search ranks TDs first when you type a surname.

We also toned down the headline type, squared off a few controls and put one clear action first on TD pages: Follow.

• Irish My TD. The My TD experience now works fully as Gaeilge, with Irish dates and links.
• Study stays up to date. Refreshing a saved page now updates the cards whose answer changed, and tells you what changed. Moving a chat into Study keeps pages and says what did not come across.
• Clearer account deletion. Deleting your alerts no longer looks like deleting your Dex account, and each says what it does and does not remove.
• Language and sign-out fixes. Switching back to English now works after switching to Irish, and signing out always lands you on the homepage.
• Easier to use with a keyboard. The closed menu on mobile no longer traps focus, and search stays put when you rotate your phone.
• Better coverage. Committees, bill stages, voting history and clearer freshness on each page, plus a public status page.

See our status page

Our new film is 2 minutes 41 seconds long.

"Ireland, brought into focus" replaces the shorter reel on the About page and the email explainer on the homepage. It walks through what happens in the Oireachtas, and how DáilDex turns it into something you can follow. It has captions and a poster, and sits in our media library.