Four years after the federal government's first chatbots began arriving on the scene to help citizens navigate services, the Department of Home Affairs has finally launched its own. The department recently began trialling a Nuance-powered digital assistant on its website to provide tailored responses to common questions using natural language and conversational dialogue. Initially limited to answering visa and citizenship questions on the immi.homeaffairs It is also capable of learning from its interactions in order to automatically improve its responses to questions over time. A spokesperson told iTnews that the trial assistant "sits on the Nuance platform and was developed in collaboration with the department's service centre provider, Datacom Connect".

Artificial intelligence (AI) might be technology's Holy Grail, but Australia's Human Rights Commissioner Edward Santow has warned about the need for responsible innovation and an understanding of the challenges new technology poses for basic human rights. "AI is enabling breakthroughs right now: Healthcare, robotics, and manufacturing; pretty soon we're told AI will bring us everything from the perfect dating algorithm to interstellar travel -- it's easy in other words to get carried away, yet we should remember AI is still in its infancy," Santow told the Human Rights & Technology conference in Sydney in July. Santow was launching the Human Rights and Technology Issues Paper, which was described as the beginning of a major project by the Human Rights Commission to protect the rights of Australians in a new era of technological change. The paper [PDF] poses questions centred on what protections are needed when AI is used in decisions that affect the basic rights of people. It asks also what is required from lawmakers, governments, researchers, developers, and tech companies big and small. Pointing to Microsoft's AI Twitter bot Tay, which in March 2016 showed the ugly side of humanity -- at least as present on social media -- Santow said it is a key example of how AI must be right before it's unleashed onto humans.