Bettina Schwarz and Sindre Wimberger both work for the City of Vienna in the “Vienna Bot Project“, among other things. Bettina’s task in this project is to feed the Vienna Bot with information and give it its charm. Sindre does digital product development, he takes care of several projects around the city of Vienna, such as an app, a city map and the heart project of the “Wien Bot”, the chatbot of the city of Vienna.

The City of Vienna needs a chatbot (Statement 2016)

While a content strategy was developed for the City of Vienna, which focused on how to provide Viennese citizens with information and answers on the channel of their choice, the topic of chatbots presented itself.

In 2016, the hype was that you could build a chatbot in Facebook Messenger. They have linked this possibility to their content strategy.

The development of the Vienna Bot

The Vienna Bot started out as a chatbot in Facebook Messenger. The impressive thing back then was that companies could suddenly use messenger bots to be exactly where their target groups otherwise only communicated privately – in Messenger!

In the beginning, they focused a lot on the content of the chatbot, but then realized that people expect a personality because you’re basically a person in their friends list. There were questions like “What’s your name, what do you do, what’s your favorite food?”. That’s when they came up with the idea of giving the chatbot Viennese charm. When the opportunity arises, the dry information is conveyed with a bit of humor and fun. People really appreciate that.

The feedback on the Vienna Bot was overwhelming. This has contributed to the fact that the administration has continued to promote the further development of the chatbot. The next step was to bring the chatbot onto its own platform. Which in this case was the “Wien Bot App”, which was launched a year later. There is a voice assistant in this app. The Vienna Bot has been given its own Viennese voice for its personality, with which it responds to users.

The Vienna Bot was then brought to other platforms, e.g. there is a web version. The new “City of Vienna App” was launched a month ago and the Vienna Bot is the central element behind it.

Step by step, we are moving away from chatbots and towards digital assistants.

How the Vienna Bot learns

The project began with the team picking out the 100 most important questions from the website and teaching the chatbot the answers to these questions in short sentences.

Since then, the chatbot has been growing steadily. The team regularly looks at the questions that users ask on the website. If there are areas where demand is very high, a story is researched and written. Current topics are also addressed.

There are guidelines for writing stories, such as that the Vienna Bot should address the user as a first name and the answer should be “as short as possible, as long as necessary”. If it fits, Viennese charm is added to the story.

Feedback – What do the Viennese say about their chatbot?

When the Vienna City Administration launched the chatbot, there was a lot of immediate feedback from the trade press. Also on Twitter and Facebook. People were thrilled. Now, in the fourth year of the chatbot’s existence, it is no longer so easy to evaluate it individually. In order to draw conclusions about how the chatbot is received, the team is now measuring its size.

When they started, there were around 25,000 responses; in 2018 there were already 150,000, last year 425,000 responses. This year they are trying to break 1 million.

The aim of the chatbot was never to relieve a hotline. That is why there are no comparative figures. But you can see that the questions asked in call centers are much more specific.

How will the Vienna Bot be developed further?

There are many ideas, but the question is always how well they can be implemented.

The content of the chatbot is constantly being developed. The wish would be that you could ask the chatbot anything, no matter where you are in public in Vienna. The big vision is to really have a voice assistant that you can use to control everything. A voice assistant with which you can speak in natural language and complete sentences.

Learnings of the Vienna Bot Team

Chatbots are more of a content challenge than a technical one. It is important to make sure that you can provide the answers to the questions. Voice assistants are the future, if you write the answers, you should write them directly for them.

And the most important thing: take the plunge! You don’t have to have everything complete to get started. You can also start small, with only a very limited use case, and then gradually develop the chatbot further.

[vc_empty_space height=”40px”]The information for this article comes from podcast episode #17, which you can listen to directly![vc_empty_space height=”20px”]

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