Signal 2: Smarter Chatbot, Smarter City
The boost in artificial intelligence is now fueling a huge number of progress in techniques. Chatbot, for example, is one of the new tools the government used in the city management. The simple text chatbots are widely used for a long time for the online customer service. However, they can only respond to some specific questions which are pre-written by the developers. The smarter ones could conduct a conversation through voice or text recognition to fulfill people’s need. There are thousands of chatbots that people can find through search engines such as ChatBottle (https://chatbottle.co.). For example, Florence for Skype which could help users to track their health situation and remind them to take daily pills.
Some city governments also began to use chatbot to both benefits the citizens and government employees. For example, the well-known chatbot CHIP (short for City Hall Internet Personality) is now providing 24–7 tireless service for Los Angeles residents. It could gather and present information about the given topic, help to fill out the form, streamline the process, answer potential police recruits, queries about city issues and more (Microsoft, 2017). The citizens are able to avoid arduous endeavor when they have straightforward questions and the government employee could have a relatively low workload with the chatbot preprocessing.
However, the chatbot also brings in some new problems. The most noted one is useless time-consuming. Although chatbot is installed to improve response rate and interaction quality, it sometimes gets stuck due to the limited dataset and could not understand the question which further causes repetitious talk and meaningless wait.
Fig.1. Gupta, M. (January 9, 2018). Chatbots: Boon or Bane? [Digital image]. Retrieved September 22, 2018, from https://www.bluelupin.com/blog/chatbot-advantages-and-disadvantages/
Microsoft in business team, (July 14, 2017). How the City of LA serves citizens with Chip the chatbot. Retrieved September 22, 2018, from https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/in dustry-blog/industry/government/how-the-city-of-la-serves-citizens-with-chip-the-chatbot/
