Espoo trials multilingual 'smartbot' for Coronavirus advice - Cities Today - Connecting the world's urban leaders

The City of Espoo in Finland is trialling a'smartbot' to provide information for citizens about Coronavirus (COVID-19). The city says the tool is smarter than a chatbot as it also understands free-form written language. "Questions to the smartbot do not need to be carefully formulated – if the smartbot cannot answer right away, it will soon learn," a statement explained. The application collects information from City of Espoo websites and other official online sources to answer the questions and will adapt responses accordingly as resources are updated. Citizens can interact anonymously and IP addresses are not stored.