Digital channels have become an easy way for citizens to connect with their local governments.
The Enfield Borough Council in North London handles 55,000 telephone calls, 5,000 face-to-face appointments and around 100,000 website visits each month. In order to absorb the growing demand from online visitors for information from the council, Enfield turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to help them take on the digital queries and provide responses in natural dialog to the community.
The AI is a cognitive technology in the form of a virtual agent called Amelia by IPSoft.
"Enfield wanted to improve the services the council provides for its residents 24/7, just like banks do with their clients," said James Rolfe, Director of Finance, Resources and Customer Services, Enfield Council. "Amelia is able to support residents by cutting down the time it takes to find the right information that they’re looking for and allows them to do so 24 hours a day, 365 days a year."
In turn, Rolfe says Amelia gives human employees more time to dedicate to complex queries and answer them more efficiently, while residents can expect faster response times as Amelia takes on some of the workload.
In addition to guiding people towards the general information they need, Amelia will be trained to support customers in going through specific processes such as applying for planning permission and applying for permits and licenses.
IPSoft says Amelia is not a bot, rather a cognitive virtual agent. Amelia is designed to process information like a human not just mimick human thought processes. Most bots in general use automated, rigidly scripted responses that pattern-match words to offer responses and lack the ability to recognize the nuance of what's being communicated.
"Amelia stands out from other technologies because of her natural language understanding, which means she can grasp the meaning and intent of what people want to convey," Frank Lansink, CEO Europe, IPSoft. "She uses a combination of different technical elements to determine the best way to respond to the person and guide them through the query."
Amelia's memory is organized like our memory with episodic and semantic capabilities. Amelia’s episodic memory gives it cognition of various experiences and events. Its semantic memory provides a structured record of facts, meanings, concepts and knowledge about the client world. The combination of the two allows Amelia to hold a more natural conversation.
Amelia also has contextual comprehension. Concepts and ideas in the human brain are semantically linked. Amelia emulates this capability so that it can quickly and reliably retrieve information across a wider and more complex set of knowledge.
Last, Amelia has emotional responsiveness and an empathy quotient that lets it keep track of every client interaction and adapt its responses accordingly so it delivers personal service to every customer.
Amelia is also aware of its own knowledge limitations. If it cannot address an issue itself, it will escalate it to a human colleague. Amelia learns by observing the response of its human colleagues to discover the best courses of action for new situations. Without assisted programming, Amelia can dynamically generate new steps to follow and incorporate them into its knowledge base once these have been approved by the supervisor.
