Kenu: a document assistant for Vanuatu law and legislation

Kenu is a retrieval-augmented generation system being built by talo. to make Vanuatu legislation, case law, parliamentary documents, and constitutional materials easier to search, understand, and use. The goal is simple: ask a question in plain language and receive an answer grounded in the indexed documents, with the sources kept close at hand.

The collection is intended to include legal and parliamentary materials such as Acts, Bills, court decisions, Standing Orders, and the Constitution. For people who need to work with Vanuatu's legal record, that can turn a long search across documents into a focused conversation with the source material.

This matters because legal and parliamentary information is only useful when people can find it. Researchers, lawyers, public servants, students, journalists, businesses, and citizens often need fast answers to practical questions: what does a law say, which document mentions a topic, or where can a specific rule be found?

In one early query, Kenu was asked whether someone can eat a coconut crab. Instead of giving a loose answer, it grounded the response in indexed documents, pointing to the Coconut Crabs (Protection) Act 1981 and explaining the conditions around catching, buying, and restrictions on coconut crabs.

That is the promise of Kenu: not replacing legal advice, courts, lawyers, or official sources, but giving people a better way to discover the relevant documents and understand where an answer is coming from.

If completed at the intended scope, Kenu may be among the first tools of its kind in Vanuatu: a private document assistant built around the country's own legislative and legal materials. The work ahead is careful indexing, source handling, verification, and user experience, but the direction is exciting.