It has been a busy few months. Since the summer we have merged more than twenty sets of changes to DáilDex. Some are big and visible, like a new Dex and a daily news desk. Others sit behind the scenes, like making sure a story about a Dáil vote can never report totals that are not in the official record. This post covers all of it in one place.
Short version: Dex is smarter and has new models, DáilDex now publishes source-checked news, Learn has grown into a proper library for students, and the site has been rebuilt to be faster to read. We have also started showing up on the first page of Google for everyday Irish civic questions, which means more people are finding plain-English answers that link back to the record.
New models, and Dex Pro
GPT 6 Luna is the new free default. Dex Pro adds GPT 6 Astra, Claude Opus 5.5, deep research and a study coach.
A better Dex
Answers can include quizzes, charts, vote tallies and a PR-STV calculator, with live search and sources you can check.
Daily news from the record
Source-checked stories twice a day, where every quote must match the page it came from.
Learn, Students and Compare
More than 40 plain-English guides, a hub for CSPE and Politics and Society, and fair party comparisons.
New models, and Dex Pro
Dex now runs on a wider set of models. The free default is GPT 6 Luna, alongside DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Gemini 3.8 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash. People who opt in to cloud training can also use GPT 6.1 Sol, Grok 4.7, GLM 5.3, Kimi K3 and Claude Sonnet 5.5. Our post on training Irish open models explains why.
Dex Pro is a new optional plan at €10 a month. It adds GPT 6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5, 500 messages a day, deep research, a CSPE and Leaving Cert study coach, Irish legal research, the /factcheck and /pq commands, and documents you can download. Everything that was free stays free: the guides, the alerts and the standard version of Dex, with 50 messages a day and no login.
A better Dex
Dex no longer answers only in text. When a picture or a tool explains things better, it can build one inside the answer. There are 15 kinds: step-by-step explainers, quizzes, charts, a PR-STV quota calculator, and Tá, Níl and Staon tallies on real Dáil votes.
- Live web search, which you can set to auto, always or off, with the sources shown as it works
- Suggested follow-up questions that link straight to the matching Learn guide
- Slash commands, editing and branching a conversation, and export to Markdown or JSON
- Optional sign-in, so your Dex pass follows you between devices
Dex still sticks to Irish civic life. It explains, quizzes and points to sources. It will not write your homework or your code.
Daily news, checked against the record
DáilDex News publishes twice a day, at 07:00 and 18:00. Each run reads the Oireachtas record and the reporting around it, then drafts a few short stories. Every source carries a word-for-word excerpt, and any story whose quote does not appear on the page it cites is held back automatically.
We hold vote stories to an even stricter rule. Any total a story gives for a vote, like “81 to 73”, must match the official count for that exact division. When one debate has several votes, each is reported separately. On our first live day, two stories merged the counts from different votes. We pulled them within about twenty minutes and added the check that now blocks that mistake.
If a claim is not in the record, it does not go out. That applies to the software as much as to us.
Stories link each named TD to their constituency page, and constituency pages list recent stories about their TDs. News is also published in formats that Google News, Bing and AI answer engines can read, and they are notified within minutes of a new story.
Alerts about your TDs
You can follow any of the 174 TDs and 60 Senators, in both Houses. Behind the scenes, alert drafting now runs in production. It focuses on the representatives people actually follow and on recent activity. Every draft is checked against a strict format before a person reviews it, so nothing is sent until it is right.
Learn, Students and Compare
Learn has grown to 44 guides in English and Irish. They cover how a Bill becomes law, how a Government is formed, how the Budget works, committees, PR-STV, the Constitution, local government and the separation of powers. There is also a glossary and a guide to finding your TD, since you have more than one.
The new students hub sorts those guides by level: CSPE, Leaving Cert Politics and Society, and university courses in PPE, politics and law. It includes a research toolkit and guidance on citing Oireachtas sources. The Compare pages set parties and manifestos side by side without keeping score.
A rebuilt site
The home page has a 60-second film, an animated inbox that shows how an alert arrives, and cleaner layouts across Learn, Students and the blog. Motion switches off if your device asks for reduced motion. We fixed a long list of Irish translation errors, gave the blog separate sections for articles and team updates, and published new methodology and API pages.
Easier to find
Most people meet DáilDex through a search like “what is a TD in Ireland” or “who is my TD”. We rewrote those guides to answer the question in the first line and added structured data so search engines understand them. DáilDex guides now show up on the first page of Google for civic questions, with a link to the official source every time. We also keep an up-to-date summary for AI assistants at /llms.txt so they can point people to the record too.
What is next
More guides, more languages done properly, and alerts reaching more inboxes. If something is wrong or unclear, reply to any DáilDex email or ask Dex, and we will look at it.
— The DáilDex team