Virtual assistant Gem

Municipality of Utrecht

The virtual assistant Gem is a digital help on the Utrecht municipality's website for answering resident and business questions. Via the chat widget on the website, you can talk to Gem

Last change on 18th of November 2024, at 11:06 (CET) | Publication Standard 1.0

• Publication category: Impactful algorithms
• Impact assessment: DPIA
• Status: In use

General information

Theme

Organisation and business operations

Begin date

202102

Contact information

[e-mail]

Responsible use

Goal and impact

Understanding the resident's question as well as possible and helping them get the right answer. This could be a substantive or procedural answer, but also a referral or transfer to a (livechat) employee. The virtual assistant is only deployed to provide answers based on nationally determined answers to resident and entrepreneur questions or referral to an employee.

Considerations

The answers that GEM can provide are in a national library. Municipal employees can modify answers to fit local situations. GEM has no role in decisions, it advises residents. GEM's input is needed to recognise the resident's or entrepreneur's question and, based on that, to estimate the likelihood of the appropriate answer. Or to make the assessment that it is better to speak to a (livechat) employee. Thanks to the algorithm, the virtual assistant is able to provide reliable government information to residents and entrepreneurs 24/7.

Human intervention

The answers provided by Gem are in a national library. Municipality staff can modify answers to fit situations of the respective municipality.

Risk management

The Utrecht data scientists, Information and Process Advisors (IPA) and Decentralised Information Security Officers (DISO) within the Utrecht municipality have, in addition to the employees directly involved, a controlling and monitoring role in the application of the algorithm. By doing so, we want to prevent the following risks from occurring:- data leak due to the public availability of personal data of Utrecht residents- algorithm takes a decision completely independently, without the intervention of an employee and without the interpretation of the relevant context of the situation- 'function creep' regarding data during the application of the algorithm, as a result of which the algorithm gives a distorted picture of what is going on. This can occur because the same type of data is used when applying the algorithm, and the algorithm uses that as confirmation of what comes out as information

Legal basis

Providing reliable government information on products and services of the municipality of Utrecht.

Impact assessment

Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA): Utrechts Uthiek Assessment

Operations

Data

National library of frequently asked existing questions and answers regarding public services, plus anonymised chat conversations between residents and GEM in Utrecht. The virtual assistant is constantly trained to recognise the resident's question. These so-called 'intents' are continuously updated, also based on non-expected input from residents. This allows the algorithm to better estimate what the resident means and which determined answer goes with it.

Technical design

The municipality offers digital help to residents and entrepreneurs with a question. This digital help is called 'virtual assistant GEM'. Via the chat button on our websites, you can talk to GEM. The virtual assistant uses artificial intelligence, also known as artificial intelligence (AI). AI helps GEM to better understand the resident and provide the right information. Specifically, GEM uses supervised machine learning, which calculates which answer from the answer library provides the best answer to the question based on the question. Once a question cannot be answered sufficiently well, the conversation is continued by an employee. At the end of the conversation, the user can indicate whether the answer helped. The next time a person asks a similar question, the answer that helped the most is more likely to be chosen. GEM can thus provide substantive answers to questions based on this library, as well as refer to an information page or have a staff member continue the conversation. The answers that GEM can provide are recorded nationwide. This costs less management and radiates more unity between municipalities.

Link to code base

https://gitlab.com/virtuele-gemeente-assistent/gem