The model explains; it does not decide

1. Turning your sentence into settings

On the planner you can type what you want, such as “near LMU, at most 750 euros, 30 minutes”. The model reads the sentence and fills in a form: campus, rent ceiling, travel limit and which priorities matter to you. The code then checks the form. A campus or employer the model names must exist in Vilayat's own list, and numbers must be within the allowed range; anything else is dropped and you are told what was not understood. You see the settings it chose and can change any of them.

2. Answering questions on Ask

Your question is compared with a stored set of documents, and only the closest passages are given to the model, with the instruction to answer from them alone and name the source of each statement. The answer is then checked before you see it:

• If no passage is close enough to the question, the model is not asked at all and you are told that the documents do not cover it.
• The answer must cite at least one passage, and every citation must point at a passage that was actually supplied.
• Every number in the answer, such as a fee, a deadline or a number of days, must appear in the cited passages.

An answer that fails a check is withheld, and you get the matching passages and their links instead. Vilayat does not search the web, so it cannot answer from pages it has not stored. Which documents those are is explained on Data and sources.

3. The short area summaries

The paragraph at the top of an area's details is written by the model in advance, from the figures the ranking uses, and checked before it is stored: every number must be one of those figures, and no other place name may appear. A summary that fails is rewritten once and otherwise dropped. When the underlying data changes, the old summary is no longer shown.

Which model

Vilayat uses Google's Gemini models through the Gemini API: a small text model (Gemini Flash-Lite) for the three tasks above, and a Gemini embedding model to compare questions with documents. What is sent to Google is described on Privacy.

A fixed daily allowance

Vilayat uses the free tier of the Gemini API, which allows a fixed number of requests per day. Every request is counted before it is sent, including the ones the offline jobs make, and when the day's allowance is used up no further request goes out. The sentence box and the Ask page then say when they are back: the allowance starts again at midnight Pacific time, which is 09:00 in Germany (08:00 for a few weeks in spring and autumn) and 12:30 or 13:30 in India.

When the model is unavailable

The planner, the map, the ranking and Compare work without the model. If it cannot be reached, or the daily allowance is used up, the sentence box and the Ask page say so, and everything else carries on.

Limits

The checks catch invented numbers and sources, but not every possible mistake: a model can still summarise a correct passage badly. Answers are information, not legal or visa advice. For anything that matters, open the linked official page.