Government institutions and businesses hear from the public through two very different channels. One is direct: the complaints, questions and disputes that arrive through official lines. The other is ambient: what people say publicly, on social platforms and in the press, often long before they file anything formal. Most organisations act on the first and miss the second – until a localised grievance has already become a widespread one.
Proto’s Perception module closes that gap. It monitors what the public is saying across social media, app stores and news sites, categorises it, and analyses sentiment, so emerging issues surface while they can still be addressed rather than only after they escalate.
What Perception does
Perception scrapes posts, comments and reviews from Facebook, X, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, news websites, Google Play and the Apple App Store, on a schedule the institution controls. Keyword groups – an organisation’s name, a programme, a product, a known scam term – determine what is captured, so the data stays focused on what matters and avoids unrelated noise.
Every captured entry is automatically categorised and scored for sentiment. A dashboard visualises total volumes, the most-mentioned entities, category breakdowns and sentiment trends over any period, segmented by source. Smart alerts notify teams by email when a keyword is detected, when mention volumes cross a threshold within a time window, or when the share of negative sentiment exceeds a defined limit.
Why it matters
The value is not monitoring for its own sake – it is connecting public signal to operational response.
For regulators and government, Perception can monitor the institutions they oversee directly: adding a regulated bank’s or operator’s own social pages as sources, then layering keyword-based tracking for a scheme name, a programme, or a known scam term across the wider public conversation. This gives a regulator visibility into how the institutions it supervises are performing in public view, not just what reaches the regulator through its own official channels.
For businesses, the same monitoring applies to their own brand: tracking mentions of a company name, product, or campaign across social media, app stores and news sites, and correlating spikes in negative sentiment with what is arriving through their own AI agent channels.
Perception feeds directly into Proto’s Analytics module, where public sentiment can be compared against livechat and ticketing data in a single view – letting a regulator or a business act before an issue compounds.
For a regulator, public agency or business already running an AI agent for citizen engagement, customer support or consumer protection, Perception adds the missing half of the picture: not only resolving what citizens or customers bring directly, but understanding what they are saying everywhere else.