The city of Denver has rolled out an artificial intelligence bot to help residents answer questions relating to city policy, regulations and rules. The bot is an extension of the city’s 311 helpline that allows residents to call and ask their questions to a staff member.
Most people don’t want to pick up the phone only to wait in a queue to speak to someone, and then be placed on hold again to get an answer. Denver realized there’s a more efficient way to serve its residents and visitors; thus, Sunny the artificial intelligence chatbot was born.
The agents for Denver’s 311 program take thousands of calls a day, and they now have some help.
“We really needed a way to provide customer service where they already are, which is on their smart devices,” said Laura Dunwoody, who came up with the idea to establish Sunny.
Sunny speaks more than 80 languages and can be accessed 24/7 on denvergov.org or through text and WhatsApp at HEY311.
“Every night, the chatbot, Sunny, ingests the entirety of all 2,300 plus pages of denvergov.org,” Dunwoody said. “So, as our web authors, which we have 150 across the city representing all the agencies, is updating their information, Sunny is reading that every night.”
With that being said, Sunny should be able to answer just about any question one might have, including whether a neighbor can have those chickens.
“When we first launched the chatbot, we were watching every transaction,” Dunwoody said. “We had one neighbor who wanted to report to the Department of Health that her neighbor had chickens, which she was fine with, but she was letting the chickens in her house, and she was concerned that this was going to hurt her property values. Ultimately, within a couple of back-and-forth clarifying questions with Sunny, what she learned was that the woman can bring her chickens into the house as long as they’re wearing chicken diapers.”
Aside from getting educated about chicken diapers, you can also use it to report concerns such as potholes or ask questions about permitting for a home improvement project.
“You could say, ‘I want to build a fence. Do I need a permit for that?’ The bot has the ability to default to a person if the bot cannot answer the question. That happens very rarely, but we’re there for it if it happens.”
Sunny has been so successful, the city of Aurora created a bot of its own called Access Aurora, and other cities such as Boulder and Broomfield are also looking into adapting the technology.
Sunny launched about a year ago but really took off in March as more and more people learned about it.
“We had our busiest month in Sunny in March, and I expect that when we’re done with April, we’ll see this was the busiest month,” Dunwoody said.
