A friendly approach to Open Government: Chatbots

Abstract

This end-of-degree project presents an idea to assists citizens in the use of Open Government online portals. These serve, among other functionalities, to do bureaucratic processes without needing to go to their offices. Most of the users do not know how to use these services or what they can do with them. It is in the interest of the government to make the inhabitants use these utilities in order to reduce bureaucracy. This problematic it is found in one of IECISA (Informática El Corte Inglés S.A.) clients: The Commonwealth of Pamplona (Mancomunidad de Pamplona). The author of this research, as an intern of this company, will develop a prototype of a possible solution for the client. The suggested solution is the use of virtual assistants for the guidance of the users. These are called chatbots. You can communicate with them and they will facilitate you the desired function, either indicating you how to do it or fulfilling the task for you. Nowadays we have several services like the one proposed, for example Siri or Google Assistant, but these are focused on daily tasks. This project takes the technology of those assistants (Natural Language Processing) and uses them to accomplish government procedures. To determine if this solution is a proper one, the author will build and publish online a chatbot that performs simple actions. In order to know if the software developed is effective, the testers will receive a poll where they will evaluate the solution. Then, these results will be analysed and some conclusions will be developed. The conclusions will address if the project is useful and if it is a viable option to increase the use of these portals.