July 2024: Assistant Updates

We are thrilled to announce the release of the latest version of Assistant on Thursday, August 29, 2024 – this will go out to all users of Assistant. Please reach out to your account team if you have any questions/concerns.

The next version of Assistant introduces three significant enhancements: (1) Iterative functionality via chat & revisions (2) a dedicated draft mode and (3) speed and quality improvements.

1. Mode Choice: Introducing Assist Mode and Draft Mode

Assistant will be divided into two modes: Assist and Draft.

• Assist Mode (default) is optimized for summarization, analysis, and ideation. Example: Identify inconsistencies across these depositions. Provide in a table format.
• Draft Mode is purpose-built for generating and revising legal language, including provisions, definitions, and short whole documents. Example: Draft an NDA for my client who is an investment fund based in Delaware, for a potential acquisition of a portfolio company.

Our research indicates that using different algorithms and underlying models for specific tasks results in stronger outputs.

2. Iterative Chat: Introducing Threads

The most common request from users has been to incorporate iterative chat functionality. We’re excited to launch Threads to address this need.

Threads are created after a user submits an initial query, allowing users to engage in follow-up questions in Assist Mode or revisions in Draft Mode.

• Assist Mode: Users can ask free-form follow-up questions (e.g., make this more concise) or utilize AI-generated suggestions based on the most recent output.

• Draft Mode: Users can prompt Harvey to revise the output or highlight specific text for focused revisions. "Show Edits" allows users to track changes between revisions.

3. Performance and Quality Improvements

The new version of Assistant includes several performance and quality improvements across various use cases, significantly enhancing Harvey’s underlying performance.

• Speed: An 80% increase in speed when generating answers.
• Excel Support: better parsing & citations for xlsx/xls spreadsheets with multiple sheets, tables, and numbers
• Hallucinations: Marked improvement in reducing hallucinations.
• Knowledge Cutoff: Updated in Assist Mode to October 2023.
• Query Handling: Improved handling of queries containing multiple requests.
• Multi-Document: Higher quality answers to queries with more than 1 uploaded document.

FAQs

When will I get access to the new version of Assistant?

We expect to roll this out to customers on Thursday, August 29, 2024 around 2:00PM PST

What happens to user queries, prompts, and examples from the previous version of Assistant?

Older queries, prompts, and examples will open in Assist Mode by default and remain accessible for the duration of your retention period. Please note that older drafting-oriented queries will now likely produce higher quality outputs if re-run in Draft Mode.

How do Threads impact the Harvey experience?

Retention: Queries and Threads will continue to follow your workspace’s retention settings, and the retention period for a given Thread is based on the date of the initial query.

Deletion: Deleting the initial query will delete all follow-ups.

History: Each row in the History table represents one Thread, combining follow-up questions with the original query.

Library:
- Examples will be available for both Assist and Draft modes.
- Prompts can be loaded into either mode.
- Prompts and examples in the Harvey tab will be updated to ensure they are utilizing the optimized mode.