This report is excerpted from an article that originally appeared in Government Technology, Techwire’s sister publication. The full report can be found here.
California counties and cities are among state and local governments nationwide that increasingly are using chatbot technology to make services and information immediately accessible to residents.
Expect to see more chatbots on local government websites in the next year or so, if they aren’t there already.
In the 2020 Digital Counties survey, conducted by the Center for Digital Government* and which collected responses from public officials in dozens of counties across the country, about 25 percent of respondents said they were already using chatbots, and another 39 percent said they had plans to start using them in the next 18 months. The remaining 36 percent said they had no plans to start using the chatbots.
The responses came in before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, an event that has pushed many governments to rapidly adopt technologies they either had little interest in or were eyeing for future use.
That includes chatbots, which county governments have used to help handle a massive influx of questions from the public. The idea is that chatbots, which typically use some form of AI algorithm, can handle common questions and leave less common or more complicated questions for human staff to answer.
Most of the counties that described chatbots for the Digital Counties program talked about bots that had a definite list of questions that they were capable of answering — in other words, we aren’t talking about Asimov-style intelligences that can learn to solve new problems and answer new questions on their own.
A lot of the counties surveyed used their chatbots for COVID-19-related purposes. But they often extended beyond that as well.
Placer County, for example, has a bot called Ask Placer that’s capable of answering more than 375 questions. The county integrated with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa so residents could access the bots with their voices. (Ben Palacio, senior IT analyst for Placer County, has written about chatbots and other topics for Techwire.)
San Joaquin County worked with other departments to figure out what their needs were and what their most frequent questions were so that they could build those into their chatbots. The county also built its bot to work in three languages, with more planned for the future.
It seems likely, given the survey results and the trends of government technology during the pandemic, that now is a time of growth for government chatbots. Especially if they can help make digital services, emergency operations and telework more workable for local governments, their usefulness might make them hard for many jurisdictions to ignore.
*The Center for Digital Government is part of e.Republic, parent company of Techwire and Government Technology.
