USA.gov, the official online portal of the U.S federal government, launched an artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbot named Sam to automate the process of helping people find information on scams and frauds.
"In early February 2019, we launched the bot on three USA.gov webpages. In over a month we’ve had over 4,000 users, and 78% have successfully asked their question and gotten an answer," says USAGov's Marietta Jelks.
The idea behind the AI-based Sam came from the need to make the process of providing USA.gov's users with access to all the information the platform has stored in its database using an automated solution.
According to Jelks, scam and fraud were the topics chosen as Sam's main focus because questions regarding these two subjects have been within the top tasks on the USA.gov platform and one of the most asked questions in the contact center.
Before starting to work on the chatbot, the USA.gov team first interviewed 32 users "who shared their experiences with scams. They didn’t just tell the facts about reporting the scam. They also spoke about their emotions and motivating factors for reporting."
After collecting all the answers after the interviews, the responses were added to a whiteboard to get an overview of the issues that got people to browser USA.gov's website in search of answers.
As discovered by Sam's developers, users were facing the following issues:
• knowing the right place to report a scam
• identifying if something was a scam
• figuring out how to recover money they had lost
Using these results as a foundation, USA.gov created navigation flowchart to be used by Sam to direct users to the correct answer for their questions, with empathetic and friendly responses designed to make him seem more receptive and approachable.
Jelks also said that the USA.gov team also "learned that our marketing automation tool offers chatbot building capability. This expedited the time to launch Sam, at no extra cost."
Sam's developers also plan to expand Sam's current capabilities to make him bilingual, to parse and correctly answer free text questions, to have it integrated with the contact center to answer basic questions, and to inquire users about how satisfied they are by its services.
USA.gov is an online platform created to improve the way the general public interact with the U.S. Government by steering its users to the information or government services they're looking for quicker.
Sam is not the only chatbot working for the U.S. Government seeing that, four years ago during December 2015, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) also
launched their own virtual assistant dubbed Emma, a chatbot which answers user questions just as Sam does and leads visitors to the page they're looking for on the USCIS website.
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