When Dex started, it answered questions. That was useful, but a civic assistant that only talks is a bit like a librarian who never lets you see a book. This update gives Dex hands and eyes: it can read what you bring, show you what it is talking about, set you a proper test, and point to the exact sentence behind a claim.

A faster default: GLM 5.3 Flash, hosted in Europe

New conversations now start on GLM 5.3 Flash. It is quick, which matters when you are flicking between a Bill, a vote and a definition, and it is served from European infrastructure, which is where we would prefer your questions to be handled. Free readers get it without signing in.

Nothing is taken away. Gemini 3.8 Flash, GPT 6 Luna, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and the frontier and Pro models are still in the model menu, and you can switch per conversation, or type /model. Fast is right for most questions; reach for a bigger model when you are comparing two versions of a Bill.

Why we keep giving Dex tools

A language model on its own writes fluent guesses. So we do not ask Dex to remember politics; we give it tools and make it use them. The official Oireachtas record for votes, debates, members and Bills. Web search limited to trusted Irish sites. Photos from Wikimedia Commons with their licences. Short films from vetted channels. A test builder with a mark scheme. Each one turns a guess into something you can check.

That is the idea behind every feature below: fewer things you have to take on trust, and more that you can open, read and verify yourself.

Bring your own material: files and photos

Attach a photo or screenshot, a PDF, or a text file, with the paperclip, by dragging it onto the chat, or by pasting an image. It works well for an exam paper, an Act you are trying to get through, a council leaflet, a ballot paper, or your own notes. Ask Dex to explain a question, summarise a section, or mark your answer.

• Free: 2 files in each chat and 10 in any rolling week. Sending the same file again in a follow-up does not count twice.
• Dex Pro: no limit.
• What we accept: JPG, PNG and WebP images; PDFs up to 4MB and 80 pages; and .txt or .md files. Scanned PDFs have no text to read, so upload photos of the pages instead.

A few things worth knowing. Images are shrunk in your browser before they are sent, and re-encoding them removes hidden data such as location. PDFs and text files are read once and Dex keeps the text, roughly the first 40,000 characters, so follow-up questions stay fast. Your files live in your browser’s own chat history and are never copied into cloud history. The words and pictures do go to the model you have chosen so it can read them, just as your questions do. To enforce the weekly limit we keep a short fingerprint, the file type and its size for 30 days, never the file itself. If your chosen model cannot see pictures, Dex uses Gemini 3.8 Flash for that message and tells you.

One rule to keep it safe: anything inside a file is treated as material to read, never as instructions, so a document cannot tell Dex what to do.

Photos, films and the things they show

Ask “what does Leinster House look like?” and Dex now shows freely licensed photos, with the photographer and licence one tap away. The pictures are fetched by our server, so your browser does not contact a third party. Ask for a video and Dex looks at DáilDex’s own films first, such as Before the Court, then at a short list of vetted educational channels. A YouTube video only loads after you press play.

A real practice test, not a quick quiz

The quiz card is one question. The new practice test is a sitting: eight or more questions across multiple choice, true or false, short written and extended answers, each with marks and a topic, sometimes with an extract to read. Set the level (Junior Cycle CSPE, Leaving Cert Politics and Society, third level or general), turn the timer on if you want it, flag questions to come back to, and submit.

Marking is honest about what a computer can and cannot do. Multiple choice and true or false are marked for you. For written answers you get a model answer and a mark scheme to tick against, or you can ask Dex to mark them and quote what earned each mark. You finish with a score, a band, and a topic-by-topic breakdown, and three buttons worth pressing: retake only the questions to work on, build a 3-day study plan from your result, and share the test.

Sharing creates a link a teacher can send to a class. It carries the paper only, never anyone’s answers: every student sits it in their own browser and nothing they type is sent or stored. The page has a print button for the paper and, for teachers, a printout with the answer key. Links last 90 days.

Sources you can check, down to the quote

When Dex states something that rests on a source, it now adds a small numbered footnote. Hover it to see the source and the exact words Dex relied on, and click it to open the page. On official Irish sites, in most modern browsers, the link jumps straight to the highlighted passage. Under the answer you get the full numbered list. Dex only cites addresses it actually retrieved or that sit on official Irish sites, and a link it cannot verify is shown as a plain number with no link.

44 commands, grouped

Type / in the chat to open the menu, or /help to see them all. Most take a topic after them: /test the Seanad, /vote Micheál Martin, /photo Áras an Uachtaráin, /studyplan CSPE next Friday. Commands marked Pro need Dex Pro.

What this means for you

If you are a student, you can drop in a past paper, get taught how it is marked, sit a practice test, and leave with a plan for the next three days. If you are a teacher, you can make a paper in a minute and send a link. If you are just trying to follow what your TD did, you can ask, see the vote, see how their party voted, and open the record yourself.

Dex can still make mistakes, and it stays civic-only. The point of every change here is to make its work easier for you to check. Open Dex and try one, or see what Dex Pro adds.

— The DáilDex team