Espoo trials multilingual ‘smartbot’ for Coronavirus advice

The City of Espoo in Finland is trialling a ‘smartbot’ to provide information for citizens about Coronavirus (COVID-19).

The artificial intelligence (AI) application on the Espoo.fi website can answer questions in 100 languages and serve 100,000 users simultaneously.

The city says the tool is smarter than a chatbot as it also understands free-form written language. “Questions to the smartbot do not need to be carefully formulated – if the smartbot cannot answer right away, it will soon learn,” a statement explained.

The application collects information from City of Espoo websites and other official online sources to answer the questions and will adapt responses accordingly as resources are updated.

Privacy

Citizens can interact anonymously and IP addresses are not stored.

The solution can already answer questions related to travel and meeting restrictions, actions to take in case of a suspected infection, where to access support as a vulnerable person, financial help available and City of Espoo services.

The most frequently asked questions that the system is unable to answer are logged so further information and ‘training’ for the tool can be provided.

Juha Metso, Director of Social and Health Services, City of Espoo, said: “A smartbot based on artificial intelligence and machine translation enables us to communicate instructions and latest updates on our services to Espoo residents who speak many different languages. Such rapid multilingual communications would not be possible without artificial intelligence.

“Although the grammar may still have room for improvement, the solution complements the City of Espoo’s communications in Finnish, Swedish and English,” he added.

The tool, which will be trialled for two months, was developed with Finnish eHealth startup Neuvo Inc. Global and uses IBM Watson Assistant technology. It will soon be added to additional City of Espoo websites and pages.

Separately, Espoo is also testing a chatbot to answer businesses’ questions about international trade, training and employment. The service is available in Finnish initially, with an English version coming soon, and will run until August.

Espoo’s initiative is the latest example of cities using digital tools to try and get information to citizens faster and at scale during the health crisis. Cities Today reported this week how a WhatsApp chatbot run by the City of Buenos Aires has handled 170,000 public queries related to COVID-19, achieving a response rate five times quicker than traditional telephone emergency response.

Image:  Nils Ackermann | Dreamstime.com