Ask Houston’s 311 data a question, out loud or typed. See a verified answer in under a second.
houston.tiersel.com
Tiersel Houston · 1 / 12
The problem, in the challenge’s own words
“Thousands of 311 dumping and litter hotspots are scattered across Houston … and nobody has a simple way to see them all in one place.”
The brief also says residents who want to help “have no simple tool to see where the need is greatest.” The records are public. Reading them still means downloads, spreadsheets and guesswork.
1.2M+311 service requests since 2024, plus older cases still open
15 minbetween updates from the City’s own 311 data
Tiersel Houston · 2 / 12
Who it’s for
Anyone with a question about their part of Houston
Residents
“Is dumping on my street being picked up?” Ask in plain words, no dashboards to learn.
Civic clubs and cleanup organizers
See where requests cluster and how long they stay open before planning a cleanup day.
Council and City staff
Answer a constituent question in the meeting, with the records behind it one click away.
Reporters and researchers
Start from a checked number, then open the exact records it came from.
These are the people the product is designed for. No partner or user adoption is claimed.
Tiersel Houston · 3 / 12
The product in action
Ask. The number lands first.
Say or type “illegal dumping in fifth ward this year”.
The count paints in about 0.2 s: 301 requests, 10 open, down 44% on the prior period.
The layout arranges around it: pipeline, calendar, trend, map.
Tiersel answers out loud while you read.
Captured from production on 27 September 2026. Live numbers move as new requests arrive.
Tiersel Houston · 4 / 12
Answers are generated interfaces
18 block types, chosen per question
Map, neighborhood choropleth, trend, stacked trend, calendar, scatter, funnel, small multiples, ranked bars, table, histogram and more. Every chart has a Data button that opens exactly the records it draws.
Tiersel Houston · 5 / 12
Go deeper
Tap a bar, area, point or record. It asks that question.
Tapping Greater Heights in “potholes by neighborhood in 2025” runs “potholes in Greater Heights in 2025”: 300 requests, 295 closed. Keyboard users focus the item and press Enter. Follow-up questions keep the scope you already set.
Tiersel Houston · 6 / 12
How it works
Jev decides. Code computes.
1
Voice or text
Speech recognition or the text box. Both enter the same engine.
2
Plan
Fixed rules, not a model, turn your words into what, where and when in about 1 ms, and say which words they didn’t use.
3
Records
It reads the City’s 311 records, about 1.2M requests, without changing them. Looking them up took a median of about 20 ms in the speed runs.
4
Jev picks the layout
TypeSafe AI’s Jev chooses which views lead, under a 1.8 s deadline. If it is late, a standard layout ships instead.
5
Spoken answer
Tiersel’s Kokoro voice reads the answer, synthesized on the server.
Houston is an edition of the Tiersel platform: the same stage, mascot, speech, themes and diagnostics that run Tiersel’s other skills. Nothing is computed in the browser, and no model writes a number.
Tiersel Houston · 7 / 12
Every answer shows its work
Follow any number back to the records it came from.
How long each step took, from your screen to the City’s records and back.
Where each number came from: the source, the filters it used and the exact lookup behind it.
The exact records behind every chart, sortable and ready to export.
A cross-check that recounts the answer from the same copy of the records.
Tiersel Houston · 8 / 12
Proof, measured in production
140/140test questions checked against the City’s records: every answer matches
≈0.2 smedian time to the first numbers on screen (180–194 ms)
≈0.4 smedian time to the full chosen layout (403–422 ms)
<1 smedian time to the first spoken word (0.83–0.89 s)
Speed: two runs of 30 fresh questions against houston.tiersel.com, 27 Sep 2026, from one desktop computer; one answer in ten took 1.3–1.6 s or longer to its first word. Accuracy: every test question answered a second, independent way straight from the records, on the same copy of the live data, 27 Sep 2026.
Tiersel Houston · 9 / 12
Where it stands
Progress, practical, potential
Progress
Live at houston.tiersel.com with health monitoring
~1.2M requests, refreshed every 15 minutes
Voice and text, 18 block types, drill-in and follow-ups
Shows its work, and checks itself on 140 test questions
Practical
Nothing to install: a web page, light or dark theme
Answers stay usable if the layout model is slow or down
States its limits: service requests, not incidents; no per-capita rates
Refuses what it can’t answer instead of guessing
Potential
The same engine could read other public datasets
Saved questions a civic club checks each week
Spanish questions and spoken answers
All of this is planned, not built
Tiersel Houston · 10 / 12
Honest boundaries
What Tiersel Houston is not
Not a model’s guess
No model writes a number. Every figure is counted from the City’s records, and you can open the records behind it.
Not a count of incidents
Counts are service requests. One pothole can have several requests, and many problems are never reported.
Not the Clean Houston! app
It answers the “see where the need is” half of that brief. Claims, crews and photos live in CleanHOU, a separate entry.
Tiersel Houston · 11 / 12
A realistic next step
Four weeks with one civic club or council office
Collect the questions they actually ask each week, answer them here, and keep only the answers they use. That list decides what to build next.
