The county has activated its chatbot, “a modular, open-source, cloud-based set of applications that improves the user experience throughout their digital interactions with the county,” Chief Information Officer Chris Cruz told Techwire in an interview. The chatbot is in a “soft rollout,” with no public-awareness campaign having been done yet.
“We wanted to implement something quickly,” Cruz said, so residents “can be well-informed on the most pressing priorities, including the current COVID-19 pandemic. We were able to implement this bot within 30 to 45 days after the initial questions were fleshed out by county staff and the Public Information Officer.”
The chatbot’s “knowledge base” is available through an API, Cruz said, “meaning the chatbot can be integrated via voice (phone call), SMS/text and other channels such as messengers without requiring changes or new coding to the core application. These channels are also in the future roadmap” -- the county’s Digital Services and Innovation Strategy, which will be released in August, Cruz said.
The chatbot is an element of the Smart County Solutions (SCS) platform.
“SCS provides a fully managed and hosted service to the county,” Cruz said, “which included the initial customization of the user interface and the construction of the knowledge base. The price to the county is on a monthly fee basis, very similar to most SaaS (software as a service) models. This cost also includes ongoing maintenance and operations, and continuous improvement as SCS monitor the chatbot usage and use real user input to further improve the training data models.”
The chatbot’s knowledge base contains more than 230 “facts” and thousands upon thousands of example inputs for its “training data” machine learning models, Cruz said. It’s tuned to recognize and respond to complete sentences or simple keyword inputs. And it’s able to offer alternatives and suggestions.
The chatbot even allows users to search through all the possible questions they could ask, as well as view and ask trending and popular questions.
County database administrators will be able to go into the back end and add search terms and other content as residents’ queries begin to show trends.
Since going live on April 4 on the home page, the bot has responded to more than 120 questions or requests.
In its “soft launch” mode, Cruz said, the chatbot is “live and available, but not actively publicized beyond the icon on the pages. The icon is a fairly common symbol of chatbots and is becoming almost a user expectation on many private-sector websites, so even without advertising, we are seeing users intuitively finding it and using it. The county may, in the future, run a campaign to drive more traffic to the bot.”
