Citymind (CZ)

School: Masaryk university Brno
Website: https://citymind.tech/

Our chatbot Tessa allows citizens to instantly obtain information that they have previously had to manually search for on the authority's website, find out in person at the office, over the phone or by email. Thanks to automation, Tessa responds in a concise and understandable way in a fraction of a second. For this purpose, we use generative artificial intelligence (Open AI), which is well suited to automate communication in this area due to its ability to process large amounts of data from the authority's website. It can help with automatic processing and analysis of large texts or extracting information from different sections of a website.

All information will now be available in a flash and easily. Whether, for example, information about municipal services, administrative changes, fees, ordinances, as well as cultural events and news. The resulting answers reflect the context and are based on a complete database of data from the city's website and other municipal subwebs. Key features include a FAQ menu and foreign language support, with Tessa responding in the language in which the person is communicating with it. Our chatbot is widely scalable and we have ambitions to distribute it to countries outside the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The AI chatbot Tessa can be easily integrated into the city's website as an extension element in the form of a pop-up chat, but also e.g. into a mobile app or an existing search engine on the web. The implementation is independent of the vendor and the website architecture. Our solution is designed for any size of municipalities and cities, with pricing based on the level of functionality and an estimate of the number of users based on site traffic.

We currently have a working prototype of the chatbot, and we are in the process of non-public testing in cooperation with the city of Kolín, Luhačovice and Mokrá-Horákov. We plan to have a finished MVP and first commercial implementation by the end of 2023. We are facing further challenges in the development area, such as the “memory” implementation, but we are tirelessly working on it with a team of 7 young university students and researchers. The link to the current functional prototype which we are preparing for deployment on the Mokrá-Horákov municipality website is here: mokra-horakov.citymind.tech

Sustainable Development Goals:
Tessa by Citymind contributes to the sustainability of cities and other authorities by enabling savings for the institution and citizens. According to a survey, more than 40% of citizens in the Czech Republic use the internet to communicate with authorities (source: https://www.czso.cz/csu/czso/12-pouziti-internetu-ve-vztahu-k-verejne-sprave). We will help them save time and Tessa will serve as a digital assistant for them. We see a lot of room for improvement in this area, as according to a survey by the Czech Ministry of the Interior, 27% of municipalities would respond to an enquiry within a week and 11% believe that the ideal situation is to respond within the legal deadline - usually within 15 or 30 days (source: https://www.mvcr.cz/soubor/komunikace-organizaci-verejne-spravy-analyza-dat.aspx). On the other hand, we will in turn allow public administration institutions to save on salaries or workload for employees who have to answer questions and communicate with the public. Benefits such as freeing up human resources, saving time and costs, improving productivity, accuracy or transparency are also promised by the concept developed by the government initiative on the use of AI in public administration (source: https://www.mvcr.cz/clanek/koncepce-klientsky-orientovana-verejna-sprava-2030.aspx). Another advantage is the chatbot's broad linguistic knowledge, which allows it to communicate equally with authority to anyone, regardless of the language they speak. Our solution facilitates communication with the authorities for all people regardless of their level of technical skills, age or native language.

We want to take advantage of the great potential for the use of automation, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of client services of the state administration and especially information services. We want to speed these up considerably and bring substantial savings. Moreover, the information is often publicly available and only needs to be passed on to the enquirer.