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🔮 Forecast

Voir takes state-of-the-art forecasting to a new level of flexibility. Now you can leverage millions of to-the-minute news articles, historical news articles, live web search, and even live Reddit search, in combination with the smartest LLMs available and industry leading forecasting methodologies, with a single line of code. All in under a few seconds response time, and for less than a dime. Yes...we turned the forecasting industry on its head. Let's see how it works:

The Forecast endpoint allows you to make any news-related forecast imaginable.

Wanna test it out? You can come to our Discord server to talk directly to the bot and ask it to make a forecast for you:

The API reference provides the most detailed information

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Making your forecast

The forecast endpoint takes a natural language query which is the forecast you want to make. For example, if you wat to forecast if Joe Biden and Donald Trump will shake hands during the debate, you would simply ask:

Internally, AskNews is reaching into news archives, building a timeline of events, getting context from all angles on the query, and then using the most intelligent LLM available to build a forecast. The returned forecast object contains the forecast, as well as all the sources it used to determine the forecast, the timeline of events, the confidence of the forecast, and the rationale behind the forecast:

print(forecast)

{
    "forecast": "It is unlikely that Trump and Biden will shake hands at the first debate in June.",
    "resolution_criteria": "This question resolves Yes if there is a documented handshake between Donald Trump and Joe Biden at the first presidential debate on June 27, 2024, either before, during, or after the debate. Otherwise, it resolves No.",
    "date": "2024-06-20T12:54:31.327335Z",
    "reasoning": "Given the high tension between the candidates, the strict debate rules, and the absence of an audience, it is unlikely that there will be a handshake. Additionally, Trump's unpredictable behavior and his previous suggestions of skipping the debate further reduce the likelihood of a handshake.",
    "sources": [<article1 dict>, <article2 dict>, ... <truncated 40 results for brevity>],
    "timeline": [
        "June 02, 2024: Biden administration prepares to announce executive action to close the southern border ahead of the first presidential debate on June 27.",
        "June 03, 2024: A supercomputer predicts a 64.6% chance of Biden winning the first debate, with predictions about the debate's tone and content.",
        "June 06, 2024: A Morning Consult poll shows a close race between Biden and Trump, with Trump leading by a single point.",
        "June 10, 2024: Trump demands Biden undergo cognitive and drug tests before the debate.",
        "June 11, 2024: Biden campaign hopes for a Trump meltdown during the debate.",
        "June 14, 2024: Trump suggests he might skip the first debate, raising doubts about his participation.",
        "June 17, 2024: Biden and Trump campaigns agree on strict rules for the debate, including no audience and muted microphones.",
        "June 19, 2024: The first presidential debate is confirmed to take place on June 27, with new rules to prevent interruptions and chaos."
    ],
    "opposite_request": "Will Trump and Biden not shake hands at the first debate in June?",
    "confidence": 0.8048588373784322,
    "choice": "No",
    "llm_confidence": 7,
    "likelihood": "Very Unlikely",
    "probability": 20,
    "web_search_results": [
        {
            "title": "Biden Campaign Adviser Refuses to Shake Trump's Hand in Debate",
            "source": "Fox News",
            "key_points": [
                "Biden campaign adviser Cedric Richmond stated he would not shake former President Trump's hand in the upcoming debate, citing past experiences with Trump's behavior.",
                "Richmond emphasized Biden's ability to rise above pettiness and left the decision to shake hands up to Biden.",
                "The debate between Biden and Trump is scheduled to take place on Thursday night, hosted by CNN and simulcast on Fox News.",
                "Richmond expressed uncertainty about whether Biden will refer to Trump as a 'convicted felon' on the debate stage due to Trump's recent legal issues.",
                "The Biden and Trump campaigns did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the matter.",
                "Published on June 27, 2024 at 09:58 by Fox News."
            ],
            "published": "June 27, 2024 09:58",
            "url": "https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-campaign-adviser-refuses-to-shake-trumps-hand-in-debate"
        },
        ... <truncated 4 results for brevity>
    ],
    "summary": "The first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is scheduled for September 16, 2024. Recent news and historical precedent suggest that a handshake between the candidates is unlikely, though not impossible.",
    "key_people": [
        {"name": "Joe Biden", "role": "Democratic presidential candidate"},
        {"name": "Donald Trump", "role": "Former President of the United States"},
        {"name": "Cedric Richmond", "role": "Biden campaign adviser"}
    ],
    "key_facets": [
        "Historical precedent of no handshakes in recent debates",
        "COVID-19 health precautions (if still relevant)",
        "Campaign strategies and public perceptions",
        "Debate rules and format",
        "Personal animosity between candidates"
    ],
    "reconciled_information": "While traditional debate protocol included a handshake, recent debates between Biden and Trump have not featured this gesture. Both campaigns seem to be using the absence of a handshake as a strategic move, with Biden's team emphasizing rising above pettiness and Trump's team maintaining an adversarial stance.",
    "candidate_models": [
        "Historical analysis of presidential debate protocols",
        "Behavioral analysis of Biden and Trump in previous debates",
        "Public health guidelines for large events",
        "Political strategy models for debate performances"
    ],
    "unique_information": "Biden campaign adviser Cedric Richmond explicitly stated he would not shake Trump's hand, citing past experiences. This public statement adds a new dimension to the handshake question, potentially influencing both candidates' behavior."
}
}

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Gaining more control

The default settings for the forecast endpoint are optimized for most use cases, but you can gain even more control over how the forecast is created. The parameters include:

• lookback: The number of days to lookback for searching and extracting contextual information to help build the forecast. Some forecasts benefit from longer lookbacks, and others benefit from shorter lookbacks - it depneds on the time-scale of your requested forecast. Defaults to 14 days.
• articles_to_use: The number of relevant articles to use to build context. AskNews searches through millions of articles to find the most relevant ones spread out through your designated lookback, and then selects the top articles_to_use to make the final forecast. Defaults to 15 articles.
• model: The model to use for making the forecast. Defaults to gpt-4o. Other available models currently include claude-3-5-sonnet-latest, meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct. If you want us to add a specific model for you, please reach out to us on our Discord server to make your request.
• additional_context: By default, Voir is finding all the relevant news related to your query, and using industry standard forecasting techniques. However, many applications require some additional context/instructions to improve the final forecast. For example, if you are asking for a Sports event forecast, you may want to query a live odds API and feed those odds into this additional_context field, with some instructions about how you'd like Voir to handle this information.
• web_search: Whether or not to run a web search to find additional context for your forecast. AskNews will determine the most appropriate web search, scrape the top 5 most relevant pages, summarize them, and include them as context when making the forecast. This is a boolean, and defaults to False. Note: this parameter cannot be used with cutoff_date in backtesting, since google searches do not permit archival searching.
• use_reddit: This is a boolean that allows you to include Reddit data in the forecast. Reddit data can be very useful for certain types of forecasts, but can also introduce noise in other types of forecasts. This feature is only available to Enterprise customers. Defaults to False.
• cutoff_date: This is useful for backtesting forecasts, you can define a cutoff date which determined the last allowed indexing date for the news search. This is a string in the format of YYYY-MM-DD-HH:MM (UTC time).

Parameters may evolve, the most updated reference is always the API reference.

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Availability

The forecast endpoint is classified as a deep API call, which falls into a different category of pricing compared to the fast api calls (such as the /news and /stories endpoints). The Analyst plan includes 500 included deep API calls (so 1k forecasts), beyond 500, each call is charged. For updated pricing information, please check out the pricing page.