This May the Australian Web Awards chose Hear Me Out as the Innovation Australian Web Award Winner for 2025.
This recognition is not just a win for Portable—it’s a win for ethical technology, co-design, and systems that truly listen. Hear Me Out is reimagining how children and young people in care engage with the institutions that shape their lives, using AI not to replace human care, but to extend its reach in safe, meaningful ways.
Building trust with technology
To ensure the reliability and effectiveness of "Hear Me Out," we developed a custom testing framework capable of running bulk tests across various scenarios. This framework utilised automated and "human-in-the-loop" testing, allowing us to make real-time adjustments to prompts and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) settings and observe the outcomes. Through technical discovery, we decided on a largely RAG-based approach. By providing the AI agent with relevant documents to search through and extract context from, we achieved greater flexibility than extensive retraining and fine-tuning.
This tech advance allows for pathways to justice that the seeker can trust, at a time that's otherwise filled with confusion and uncertainty.
From Luke Thomas, Portable's Principal Product Strategist
"Winning an Australian Web Award for Hear Me Out is a real honour and demonstrates the value of working closely with our partners at the National Justice Project, the Kaldor Centre, and the people with lived experience that we were designing this for. This award is proof that when you listen deeply and design with care, you don’t just make good digital services—you create something that empowers, informs, and makes a difference in people’s lives. That’s what we’re here to do."
A new kind of digital public infrastructure
Winning for the most innovative website at the AWIA Awards is a signal that Australia is ready for a new kind of digital infrastructure—one that’s deeply collaborative, technically rigorous, and socially responsible.
At Portable, we build ethical, human-first technologies that improve quality of life at a systems level. Hear Me Out is what that looks like in action.
More on the award-winning tech behind Hear Me Out
For more about the technical side of Hear Me Out, specifically on the AI set up, including our use of RAG in the conversation-based platform, read more here.
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