The Belgian city of Kortrijk in Flanders has launched a new chatbot on the city’s website which operates on ChatGPT’s artificial intelligence.
The Virtual Assistant is planned to roll out the project in other Flemish cities and municipalities as well, and is part of the Gemeente zonder Gemeentehuis project, the subsidy programme in which Flanders supports local administrations that develop digital solutions to make service delivery more efficient.
"This Flemish Government is investing massively in the digitisation of the public administration. It is super important that local administrations jump on the train with it," concludes Flemish Minister-President Jan Jambon (N-VA).
"Often the info residents are looking for can be found on the city’s website. However, it is not always obvious to locate the right web page with the correct information. That’s where the new Virtual Assistant offers great added value. This smart chatbot should make the service to our citizens even faster, better and above all more efficient," says Mayor Ruth Vandenberghe (Lijst Burgemeester).
The Kortrijk Virtual Assistant works on the basis of generative artificial intelligence and writes its own answers instead of choosing them from a list of answers. The chatbot features machine learning, allowing the user to ask additional questions based on previous answers. It also uses ‘natural language processing’, allowing it to deal with spelling mistakes and synonyms. The Virtual Assistant is even able to detect emotions during conversation. This means it can sense when someone is angry or emotional and respond appropriately.
The Flemish Government sees the local project as a pilot project and also wants to roll it out further to other towns and municipalities in Flanders, starting with the municipalities from the Leiedal region, which includes, besides Kortrijk, Anzegem, Avelgem, Deerlijk, Harelbeke, Kuurne, Lendelede, Menen, Spiere-Helkijn, Waregem, Wervik, Wevelgem and Zwevegem.
"We have provided 33 million euros for local governments to make a digital leap. This is one of the projects and proposals submitted to improve digital services. We will further roll out this project in other cities and municipalities so that they too can benefit. In this way, we want to avoid local governments having to reinvent the hot water each time separately," said Flemish Minister for Home Affairs Bart Somers (Open VLD).
The project was presented in Kortrijk on Tuesday.
