Some questions cannot be answered with “roughly”. Last month’s inflation, this week’s tax exchange rate, the status of a volcano, or today’s maghrib time need data from the publisher, for the period and location being asked about. Starting today, for questions like these IsonAI fetches the data from its publisher’s official channel when you ask, then shows you where the data came from.
What data
IsonAI is now connected to these official data channels:
- Statistics Indonesia (BPS): inflation, exports, foreign tourist arrivals, open unemployment, the Human Development Index, hotel occupancy, wholesale rice prices, and official statistics releases, national and provincial.
- Bank Indonesia: the JISDOR rate, transaction rates, the BI-Rate, press releases, and daily food prices from PIHPS.
- Ministry of Finance: the weekly tax exchange rate.
- BMKG: weather forecasts, severe-weather warnings, latest and felt earthquakes, and port and sea-area weather.
- MAGMA Indonesia (Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources): volcano activity levels.
- Posko Banjir, Jakarta Provincial Government: floodgate water levels and status.
- Ministry of Religious Affairs: prayer times from Bimas Islam data, retrieved through the MyQuran service that publishes it, for today, tomorrow, or the day after.
- KBBI, Language Development Agency: word meanings, derived forms, and standard spellings.
- NOAA Aviation Weather Center: current airport weather (METAR) and airport forecasts (TAF).
The Official data card
Every answer that uses data from these channels now carries an Official data card underneath: the agency’s name and logo, the kind of data, when it was fetched, and a link to the official channel. That channel is also listed first among the sources with an Official tag. You no longer have to guess whether a figure came from a news site, a blog, or the publisher itself, and you can check it in one click.
Logos indicate where the data comes from; they do not imply a partnership with the agency.
What we found while testing
Before release, we opened the data categories one at a time, tested each in real conversations, and matched the figures in the answers against their sources. A few findings from that process:
- Tomorrow’s prayer times. Previously, “prayer times tomorrow in Surabaya” was answered with a calculation that was off by almost half an hour from the official schedule. Prayer times for tomorrow and the day after now come from Ministry of Religious Affairs data.
- One minute matters. For maghrib in Semarang, a calendar site said 17:34 while the Ministry’s data said 17:35. Now, when another web source states a different figure, the official publisher’s figure is used.
- Word meanings per KBBI. Word-meaning questions used to be answered from the model’s memory and could drift from KBBI. Meanings, including derived forms such as “bergeming” and non-standard spellings such as “apotik”, now come straight from KBBI.
Limits
Official data is fetched only for the kinds of data listed above. For other questions, IsonAI may use web search and show its sources. Fetching data also depends on the availability of the source service. Prayer times are retrieved through the MyQuran service, which publishes the Ministry’s Bimas Islam data, and airport weather comes from the NOAA Aviation Weather Center, a provider of international aviation weather data.
The full list of channels and how it works is on the Public services page of the IsonAI documentation. The feature is live now at isonai.com.