Case study
Kuya J, the Philippines' civic assistant, runs on NYO
chat.bettergov.ph helps Filipinos make sense of government - services, laws, budgets, bills and public projects. Every answer it gives is generated by an open model called through NYO.
-
questions answered
-
tokens processed
Live from NYO's request log for Kuya J's key - it ticks up as people ask questions.
“Public knowledge, made clearer.”
- chat.bettergov.ph
BetterGov.ph is a volunteer-built, open-source portal that links Filipinos to government agencies, services and public data in one searchable place - an independent community project, not an official government service, built in public on GitHub. Kuya J is its assistant: a place to ask, in plain language, how something in government works.
What people ask Kuya J
Government services and agencies
Where to go, what to bring, what it costs.
Laws and citizens' rights
What the law says, in plain words, with Juris.ph behind it.
The national budget and public projects
Where the money goes and what is being built.
English, Filipino, or a little of both
People ask the way they speak.
Why NYO
Easy to build on
Kuya J calls NYO's OpenAI-compatible endpoint with one API key - the same shape of call BetterGov's volunteers already knew. No provider accounts to open, no credentials to juggle, no SDK to learn: point the existing client at NYO's base URL and it works. When a stronger open model comes out, NYO reroutes the same model name, and Kuya J gets smarter without a code change.
Scales with its users
BetterGov is built by volunteers, but its audience is the whole Philippines. Traffic arrives in bursts - a bill in the news, a budget release - and Kuya J has to keep answering. NYO spreads that load across its provider network, so a volunteer team gets the headroom of much larger infrastructure without operating any of it.
State-of-the-art open models
Kuya J answers in English and Filipino, often mixed in the same sentence, grounded in BetterGov's own pages. That needs a current, capable open-weight model - and those improve month by month. Through NYO, BetterGov always has access to the frontier of open models as soon as they are available, instead of being pinned to whatever was chosen on day one.
Guardrails keep it civic
A civic assistant should stay on civic questions. NYO's guardrails let BetterGov keep Kuya J on topic - requests that fall outside its purpose are turned away before they reach the model, and the team can see what was blocked on its own observability page.
Building something like this?
A knowledge-grounded assistant on open models, with one key and guardrails built in.
Kuya J is built and run by BetterGov.ph; its images are theirs and used here to describe their project. Kuya J can make mistakes - verify important information. NYO provides the model access described here and nothing else.