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Governments Seek Voice Recognition Tools to Streamline Services

Governments at all levels — state, county and city — are looking to automate citizen services, with many departments looking to artificial intelligence or natural-language responses.

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Governments at all levels — state, county and city — are looking to automate citizen services, with many departments looking to artificial intelligence or natural-language responses.

"The things I'm seeing more and more of is people at Covered California, people at LA Care, they're interested in getting people off of those long call trees, and getting them in and out of their services faster," Nuance Communications' Robert Wisneski told Techwire in an interview.

Using Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) and application programming interface (API) integration in back-end systems can streamline access to information.

Orange County government has been testing an interface with Amazon's Alexa technology, allowing residents to access information via an Alexa skill.

"We saw the need to adapt apps so they could clearly communicate equally across all these landscapes — I see that same need with voice," Orange County CIO Joel Golub told Techwire. "We are seeing a proliferation of more and more voice-activated apps, and it's my belief that over the next few years — certainly by the mid 2020s — we will see voice interface as the primary method of communicating with apps.

"Our test with Alexa was designed to help us understand what would be involved in that process — to get us to the point where we can start to envision what that process may look like."

Government's interest in IVR technology is fueling private industry, as well.

"A lot of the big technology companies are also moving into that space, which further enhances and validates — this is easier. If it's easier, that's part of the reason for technology, to make the cumbersome way we interact with our devices go away," said Wisneski, Western region GovEd territory manager for Nuance.

Some counties are looking at the technology to automate frequently asked questions, while others are considering it for traffic ticket payment systems.

"We're also seeing another phase of our technology where you can ask two open-ended questions. So now we can append two different strings of data ... so I can give the customer an even better answer, based on complex and unique data elements," Wisneski said.

Los Angeles County's Internal Services Department is considering a similar system for customer service and its child-abuse hotline. Creating dialogue  streams that can react to open-ended statements can reduce the time customers and agents spend getting what they need. 

"We're starting to see government adapt to this idea that citizens want service 24/7," Wisneski said. "It's not enough anymore to have people there from 8 to 5, catering to the needs of government and citizens."  

Kayla Nick-Kearney was a staff writer for Techwire from March 2017 through January 2019.