Within the next five years, trends in technology, specifically regarding chatbots and other digital interface tools, will enable an increase in civic participation and government accountability. The trend in bot technology will change user habits and demands, both as consumers and as citizens. How the government meets this demand, as we see it, has the potential to generate enormous positive social impact.
The U.S. government contains both intentional and unintentional inefficiencies. Despite slow changes towards a more agile and flexible government (e.g., the work of 18F and USDS) we’ve yet to see technology used to truly link citizens with their government. In order to describe our vision of how this process might improve, we will frame our …show more content…
They can combine many applications into a single voice or text-based interface. They interact with users with natural language, which they acquire from example social media posts, search queries, and recorded speech. While existing bots can currently only accomplish a limited range of tasks (and some are still supported by humans) their functionality will increase as they learn from more interactions [4] and as their algorithms are further refined and computational power continues to grow. Bots have been labeled “invisible apps”. As an article in The Economist from April 2016 noted, “Installation takes seconds; switching between them does not involve tapping on another app icon; and talking to bots may be more appealing than dealing with a customer-support agent of a bank or airline, for example” [5]. The potential for bots as a consumer good is huge; their potential for governance and society is even …show more content…
With greater access to online channels, more people are transitioning to using government services online. This has led to an influx of daily online queries to some agencies. "Customers have every right to expect meaningful and timely information brought to them” [8], an expectation consumers and citizens will increasingly expect and demand from their government.
An important, nascent trend is digital governance. Internationally, more tech-savvy forms of government have emerged already. The D5 countries (Estonia, the UK, New Zealand, South Korea, and Israel) have begun to or have already digitized many services. Estonia offers hundreds of services through its government platform directly to citizen’s computers and smartphones. Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) is exploring the use of chatbots, in partnership with Microsoft, to help users navigate online government services
The U.S. government contains both intentional and unintentional inefficiencies. Despite slow changes towards a more agile and flexible government (e.g., the work of 18F and USDS) we’ve yet to see technology used to truly link citizens with their government. In order to describe our vision of how this process might improve, we will frame our …show more content…
They can combine many applications into a single voice or text-based interface. They interact with users with natural language, which they acquire from example social media posts, search queries, and recorded speech. While existing bots can currently only accomplish a limited range of tasks (and some are still supported by humans) their functionality will increase as they learn from more interactions [4] and as their algorithms are further refined and computational power continues to grow. Bots have been labeled “invisible apps”. As an article in The Economist from April 2016 noted, “Installation takes seconds; switching between them does not involve tapping on another app icon; and talking to bots may be more appealing than dealing with a customer-support agent of a bank or airline, for example” [5]. The potential for bots as a consumer good is huge; their potential for governance and society is even …show more content…
With greater access to online channels, more people are transitioning to using government services online. This has led to an influx of daily online queries to some agencies. "Customers have every right to expect meaningful and timely information brought to them” [8], an expectation consumers and citizens will increasingly expect and demand from their government.
An important, nascent trend is digital governance. Internationally, more tech-savvy forms of government have emerged already. The D5 countries (Estonia, the UK, New Zealand, South Korea, and Israel) have begun to or have already digitized many services. Estonia offers hundreds of services through its government platform directly to citizen’s computers and smartphones. Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) is exploring the use of chatbots, in partnership with Microsoft, to help users navigate online government services