Artificial intelligence in smart cities - How does it make the city smarter?

Citizens living in Pune, a smart city in Maharashtra, India. Now don’t need to rely on the traditional ways of communicating their queries to the local bodies. The pain of traveling back and forth to the department, waiting for endless hours to get through the registration process, and many other activities are now simplified by the Pune Municipal Cooperation (PMC) AI chatbot. 

Doesn’t this sound like something we all want? To get our work done with less hassle, especially when it comes to the government sector? That’s what a chatbot does, lessen the burden of the government body and flow effective conversations. 

“Chatbots let citizens navigate government entitlements and create easy access for citizens to understand and engage with local services,” says Gartner, in a recent report.

The problem.

Smart cities around the world work with different missions and objectives with a prime focus to make their citizens lives easier. Talking about India, the 100 smart cities mission launched by the Prime minister to provide core infrastructure, sustainable environment and create smart solutions for the citizens. However, it still becomes difficult for citizens to find the accurate information or get an update regarding the complaint filed. The conversation between the government and the citizens still feels disconnected. Looking on the other side, it also becomes difficult for the local body to answer thousands of queries at one go. As the process is handled by human agents it becomes difficult to handle such a huge number of queries, it goes beyond human capacity. 

The solution.

The answer to the citizen's problem can be understood by their daily pattern of communicating. Which mostly juggles between calls and chat. Either we call or chat over messaging platforms and portals. Over a period of time chat is getting an extra edge over other methods as it is the quickest and easiest way to connect. Now, brands have started to adopt this technique to get closer to their customers.

The way brands are floating such conversations with the help of an AI-powered chatbot.  Not only for brands, but a chatbot holds a lot of capability to solve the key problems of the smart cities/ government bodies starting from automating their regular task of answering FAQs to allowing citizens to pay their dues via chatbot. Chatbots are machines that strike a conversation with the user/citizens via the internet.

Artificial intelligence works as the most important element of the chatbot. As it helps the bot to act like a human. If you are new to this concept of Artificial intelligence, chatbot and chatbot development you can read our blog to understand these terms in a deeper way.

The Action

After detecting the problem of communication and the knowing chatbot is the solution. Here are the actionable steps designed by us that will help to bridge the communication gap

• Floatbot as a chatbot development platform has made available the eGovernance services, ULB (Urban Local Body) services, CCRS (Comprehensive Complaint Redressal system) and ICOP (Integrated City Operations Platform) services to Citizens over intuitive Smart city applications, thus increasing the usage of these digital systems implemented by Government and ULBs. AI Chatbot and Voicebot is acting as a bridge between the Citizens (living in the smallest village as well)
• Chatbot automates citizen queries, analysis of citizen pain areas, Payment of taxes and e-Challans, and citizen engagement using Artificial Intelligence Chatbot.
• Chatbot provides transaction/payment facility over the AI chatbot. This allows citizens to pay property tax, eChallan, water tax, professional tax or any other tax/payment over AI Chatbot.
• Citizens can get regular reminders of payment before the due date in their local language through AI Chatbot.
• The citizen can login or sign up in the chatbot and check the details about their due taxes or status of their complaints over the chatbot. Login/Sign-up is available on AI Chatbot and is linked with Mobile Number/OTP for verification to avail personalized services on AI Chatbot. AI platform is linked with Aadhaar services or can be linked with any other Citizen Identification stack. (India stack or SSN or any other stack).
• Chatbot engages with the citizens especially youth by broadcasting personalized reminders for tax payment, update on complaint status, government policies, health updates, sending regular updates, polls, surveys, targeted broadcasts to a particular age range of citizen. It can also be integrated on multiple channels to strike real-time conversation (citizen touch-points) such as Government web portal, Android app, iOS (iPhone) app, Facebook, Whatsapp, Skype, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Government Kiosks, Physical Robots, and many others.
• If Chatbot or Voicebot can’t answer citizen query, then chatbot will fall back to live human agent (helpdesk). Helpdesk team will answer to citizen query and when the human agent will exit the chat or voice call, citizen will again be pointed to AI Chatbot/Voicebot.
• Floatbot allows the citizens of ULBs to directly interact with AI Chatbot in the local language to resolve their queries, access online services, and Smart city services. 

Forecasted outcomes.

If these actions are implemented by the smart cities, it will lead to modernization and improve the engagement between the government, and the citizen of India. The simplicity of the chatbot will make it easy for a small child or layman to get access to government services over Whatsapp or nearby Kiosk machine and register a complaint in a respective department of ULB or take pictures and send them using Whatsapp to CCRS system (Citizen Grievance system). The government will also get first-hand data about Citizen’s pain points and Sentiments to get a deeper understanding of their problems.

The conclusion

AI-powered chatbot will increase transparency between Government and Citizen Services. Citizens will feel more satisfied with the local government working on their issues. A chatbot will the help smart city to improve the quality of interactions it has with the user and generates data that helps them to understand the pain points in their area and make strategy accordingly.

If you have any questions feel free to ask us over here: connect@floatbot.ai