Open digital assistant

Italy

Rimini

Published at 24/03/2023 Last update 20/04/2023

Award Graphic Label Test

Improving public service delivery

Description

Government and public sector

The digital assistant present on the institutional page of the Municipality of Rimini since October 2021 is an innovative service available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which supports citizens in finding information relating to all the administrative services offered on the institutional portal. Through a chat window it is possible to converse with the digital assistant, submitting questions and requests, obtaining information, assistance and support.

Problem or opportunity

The digital assistant was designed following the principles of conversational design to guarantee the citizen an interaction experience that is as natural and intuitive as possible. Thanks to the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology and Deep Learning algorithms, the Digital Assistant is able to interpret user requests in an increasingly precise way by answering an ever-increasing number of questions. In this way, the citizen who needs to use one of the services offered by the local Public Administration is supported and made autonomous in the search for information and in accessing the services themselves. The continuous availability and speed of response of the Digital Assistant make it possible to take advantage of a more informal and complementary channel compared to traditional ones (email, telephone, physical counter...) thus also lightening the workload of operators.

Benefits

In the first five months of activity, the Digital Assistant responded to over 50,000 messages sent by citizens of the Municipality of Rimini. There were around 15,000 conversations of which 93% were managed autonomously by the robotic assistant, i.e. without having to request the subsequent intervention of a human operator from the Municipality to resolve the questions posed by citizens.

The strengths of the digital assistant are:

Availability 24/7/365 in assisting and guiding the citizen in accessing and using all the services of the Municipality of Rimini;
The speed and immediacy of response via chat, as well as the possibility of managing multiple conversations initiated by multiple users at the same time, lightening the workload of the operators;
The ability to take charge of diversified requests and to respond on subjects that are also very different from each other;
The ability to recognize and interpret requests expressed in natural language;
The possibility for the administration to be able to modify, update and expand the information scope on which the digital assistant is educated.

Technologies

This is possible thanks to the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as Machine Learning and Deep Learning used to implement AI training with the application of NLP for understanding human language.

Screenshot of the chatbot: