Particularly in times of crisis, there is an increased need for information among the population. Public services experienced a particular stress test with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. They faced the challenge of coordinating and communicating daily Covid-19 updates on protective measures and instructions to the citizens.
To relieve the burden on call centres and health advice services, and to provide citizens with targeted and quick answers to their questions, the City of Vienna used its digital assistant ‘WienBot’ to set up a ‘CoronaBot’ at the beginning of the corona crisis. Within a few days, citizens were able to access relevant information about Covid-19 via the digital assistant. In the following weeks, WienBot was continuously expanded with current information, trained and improved by the questions asked. The plan was to guide citizens through times of crisis on a channel they already trusted, and to ease the burden on call centres. This plan worked out perfectly: the City of Vienna’s digital assistant has answered more than one million questions on Covid-19 since the beginning of the corona crisis.
In 2017, Vienna was the first city in the world that launched its own intelligent voice assistant. With its development, the City of Vienna did not only respond to a digital trend; by harnessing technical innovation and placing citizens’ needs at the centre of communication, WienBot supports Vienna’s Smart City strategy. This calls for ‘high quality of life for everyone in Vienna through social and technical innovation in all areas, while maximising conservation of resources’.
Since the launch of WienBot, citizens have enjoyed using the channel and are constantly involved in its further development, for example by asking questions on relevant topics. As a result, the digital assistant is in a constant process of learning and expanding its knowledge. Furthermore, citizens are already familiar with the channel as a trustworthy source of information, which is highly beneficial during a crisis. As a mass communication channel during the crisis, WienBot played fully to its strengths by using artificial intelligence and the integration of trusted public data sources.
WienBot automatically answered thousands of questions on the current corona situation every day during the lockdown. By tailoring answers to the respective situation of the searchers, it allowed citizens to get up-to-date, verified information without having to go through a time-consuming web search. For this purpose, WienBot was trained with several thousand questions and technical terms on the topic of the corona virus; the biggest effort was to prepare the complex topic in a short and simple way. In addition, all effects of the lockdown had to be incorporated into already existing answers within a very short time. Current information (e.g. from expert sources such as AGES, the Austrian Health and Food Safety Agency) was continuously updated via interfaces to public databases, and the answers were automatically prioritised according to relevance and urgency.