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Have you ever felt an urgent need to communicate with the state authorities after business hours? Or found yourself in a situation when you are not sure which public power is responsible for specific services?
You are not alone, and the Estonian state has understood that there are many like you out there. To efficiently solve these recurring problems, Estonia will be launching a national #AI chatbot called Kratt with a focus on providing the best user experience possible.
Talk to the state whenever wherever
Information System Authority (who coordinates the development and administration of information systems) and the Police and Border Guard Board will be the first public institutions to test the central chatbot model. The aim of the national #KrattAI chatbot is to make it easier and smoother to communicate with state authorities. #KrattAI chatbot would allow citizens to access the state services at any time of the day through a comfortable user experience. Estonia has set an ambitious goal to replace approximately 50 public services by using AI solutions by the end of the year 2020. As of October 2020, there are at least 41 AI solutions deployed in the Estonian public sector. These solutions include forecasting models for Road Administration, speech recognition tool Hans for Estonian Parliament, a solution for transcribing emergency calls, etc.
One chatbot for all
Before establishing the solution, exhaustive research will be conducted to analyze technical background, capabilities, and opportunities and map the test period’s bottlenecks. The big goal is to create a prototype that will serve as a central chatbot model for all government institutions. Also, this helps to avoid duplicate developments and can be set up easily to serve different needs of state institutions. The uniqueness of the solution is that it is based on a distributed model, where each chatbot is developed on its own, but capable of communicating with other similar chatbots in order to deliver the most relevant service for the citizen.
PPP
As with every other digital solution in Estonia – a public, private partnership model is used in the #AI strategy. This specific solution will be implemented by the Estonian company NetGroup who won the first chat robot procurement. NetGroup has said that #KrattAI chatbot is taking the communication between the citizens and the state to an entirely new level.
A bot that understands slang and dialects
What are the main benefits of this #KrattAI Chatbot? First, the chatbot is always available, smart, and even able to understand slang and dialects. The chatbot also impresses with its answers’ speed and is happy to recommend more information than you asked. For instance, if a citizen requests information about founding a new company, Kratt #AI, will proactively remind them that their driver’s license expires in four months. Therefore, it is an excellent way to save citizens’ time, effort and make sure they don’t forget anything important.
NetGroup will work together with Texta, who helps them with text analysis for the chat robot. Texta’s different components are the first block of AI to get into the public code repository. NetGroup’s long-term experience in working with the public sector helps them understand the needs of businesses, the state, and end-users.
#KrattAI chatbot is going to be the future of Estonia. And I very much hope also the future for all of you accessing the Estonian governmental services.
