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Insights Driven

Conversational AI Copilot: Making Public Services More Accessible

A new way of interacting with users

Overview

The Scottish government offers a broad range of services, but many residents struggled to find the ones that met their needs. To address this, Insights Driven and intive partnered to create ConnectingYouNow, a GenAI-powered multimodal assistant that bridged the gap between citizens and public services, with a strong focus on accessibility for all.

Client

Insights Driven

Services

Generative AI

Conversational Search

Chatbot

AI Assistent

UI/UX

Cloud Deployment

Accessibility

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The Challenge

The Scottish government offers a wide range of services, both directly and through third-sector organizations, including healthcare, social care, financial and legal support, food banks, and activity groups. However, residents struggled to find the ones that met their needs.

Insights Driven and intive worked together to develop an innovative solution that efficiently connects Scottish citizens with the right public services and information. Ensuring accessibility for all was a key requirement, especially for individuals with visual or hearing impairments.

The Solution

Insights Driven and intive developed ConnectingYouNow (CYN), a GenAI-based multimodal conversational search co-pilot that serves as a personal assistant, offering both voice and text interaction.

Considerations in designing a best-in-class solution were two-fold. First, as a public-facing platform, accessibility, accuracy, and data integration had to be carefully addressed. Second, since GenAI is a rapidly evolving technology, the team constantly needs to stay up to date with the latest trends to determine the best-fit architecture and solution for the product.

Thanks to innovative thinking, technical expertise, and close collaboration with the community, the team overcame these challenges and built a pioneering solution.

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Accessibility: A Key Element in CYN’s Design

The ethos behind this process was to ensure CYN works for the 20% of the population with potential challenges, while making it highly user-friendly for the remaining 80%, irrespective of their abilities. The team took a user research and design-driven approach, ensuring that individuals with diverse needs and abilities were consistently involved in the development process. From day one, they adhered to WCAG 2.1 accessibility guidelines and conducted audits to support this objective.

With a focus on creating a seamless user experience, the team developed a flexible conversational interface capable of understanding both text and voice commands. This ensured that people with special needs, such as visual impairments, hearing difficulties, or low digital literacy, could easily discover and interact with services. The team achieved this through iterative user testing and the integration of cutting-edge voice technology that can understand and converse with individuals with a Scottish accent.

Additionally, the platform was made available in multiple languages, fostering inclusivity for the many people living in Scotland whose first language is not English.

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A Constantly Evolving GenAI Solution

CYN leverages the latest advancements in conversation technology from OpenAI to facilitate contextual and effective natural language interactions with users. Our team is constantly improving the solution with more advanced technology options to provide meaningful information and accurate results for user queries.

Our GenAI solution is geared to help organizations enrich their content and data during the configuration process, thus improving the overall effectiveness of the platform. Moreover, CYN can detect emergency situations in the chat and appropriately redirect users to Emergency Service Contacts.

The team has built a sophisticated tool that automatically tests the quality of conversations and search results, supporting AI engineers in ensuring the platform operates as intended at all times.

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Designed to be a one-stop shop for public services in the country, the CYN assistant brought numerous benefits to the community and the government.

First, it increased awareness of available services and improved the user experience. By meeting high accessibility standards and engaging in contextual, targeted, and empathetic human-like conversations, CYN enables residents to quickly and easily find relevant information close to where they live.

Additionally, user interactions with CYN provide valuable, actionable insights for the Scottish Government. Analyzing service usage, identifying gaps within those services, and identifying regions that rely heavily on specific services guided focused investments and optimized resource allocation.

The progress made with CYN paves the way for further developments, expanding its capabilities to deliver a more comprehensive user experience.

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