LawDecodes – An AI-powered web platform that simplifies legal and government documents into easy-to-understand language for the common citizen.
Most citizens struggle to understand government schemes, legal notices, contracts, and official documents due to:
- Complex sentence structures
- Technical jargon and legalese
- Long, tedious formatting
- English-only or overly formal Hindi versions
- Lack of accessible summaries or translations
Who is affected?
- Common citizens with limited education
- Senior citizens or visually impaired people
- Rural populations with minimal legal exposure
- Students, journalists, and activists needing simplified interpretation
Real-world impact:
- Missed benefits and schemes
- Signing documents without understanding them
- Exploitation due to lack of comprehension
- Dependence on middlemen or misinformation
- Inequity in access to rights and resources
A web-based platform where users can:
- Upload documents (PDF, image, or text)
- Automatically extract and simplify content using AI
- Compare original vs simplified versions side-by-side
- Access legal term definitions via tooltips
- Translate simplified text into Indian languages
- Listen to the explanation via text-to-speech
- Ask follow-up questions via an integrated chatbot
- AI-Powered Text Simplification – T5/BART NLP models
- Document Upload Support – Text, PDFs, and Images
- OCR for Scanned Docs – Tesseract
- Dual View – Original vs Simplified comparison
- Tooltip Glossary – Legal word explanations
- Multilingual Support – Indian language translations
- Text-to-Speech – Audio output for simplified text
- AI Chatbot – Follow-up question answering
- Responsive UI – Mobile and desktop-friendly
Frontend:
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript
- Tailwind CSS / Bootstrap
Backend:
- Python (Flask)
AI/NLP Tools:
- Hugging Face Transformers (T5, BART)
- MarianMT / M2M100 for translation
- SpaCy / NLTK for preprocessing
- pyttsx3 or gTTS for TTS
- Tesseract OCR for scanned docs
PDF/Image Processing:
- PyMuPDF, pdfminer.six
- Pillow, OpenCV
Hosting Platforms:
- Hugging Face Spaces (models)
- Render / Replit / Vercel (web hosting)
- Upload Document (PDF/Image/Text)
- OCR + PDF Parsing (Tesseract, PyMuPDF)
- Text Simplification (T5/BART)
- Glossary Generation (Tooltip terms)
- Optional Translation (local languages)
- Optional Text-to-Speech output
- Final Output + Chatbot
Original:
All beneficiaries belonging to SC/ST households with an annual income below Rs. 2.5 lakh are eligible for interest subvention under this scheme.
Simplified:
If your family belongs to the SC/ST category and earns less than Rs. 2.5 lakh a year, you can get a discount on loan interest under this scheme.
- India-centric legal use case
- Designed for non-experts & underrepresented groups
- Regional language support
- Multi-modal accessibility (text, audio, visual)
- Open-source civic tech potential
- Chrome Extension for web simplification
- WhatsApp/Telegram bot integration
- Voice-based input/output
- "Explain My Contract" clause-by-clause explanation
- Document tagging and classification
- Mobile app for accessibility
- Awareness about government schemes
- Simplifying RTI replies or court notices
- NGOs assisting citizens with paperwork
- Legal aid volunteers & students
- Civic tech & multilingual education platforms
| Week | Task |
|---|---|
| 1 | Requirement gathering, wireframes |
| 2 | Frontend + Upload & PDF Parsing UI |
| 3 | OCR & Text Extraction Module |
| 4 | AI Text Simplification Model Integration |
| 5 | Translation + TTS Integration |
| 6 | Glossary + Tooltip Functionality |
| 7 | AI Chatbot + Final Testing |
| 8 | Deployment + Documentation |
- Functional MVP web application
- Impactful social accessibility solution
- Portfolio-worthy AI project
- Potential for real-world deployment
- Open-source release for civic tech adoption
This project is open-source and available under the MIT License.