The development of an Artificial Intelligence (AI)I conversational chatbot by the Business Registration Service (BRS) is a significant milestone in the journey towards digital transformation in the context of the Kenyan Government.
The Chatbot has been developed with the support of The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH, GIZ’s FAIR Forward programme, under the umbrella of the Digital Transformation Centre Kenya. The development process involved extensive planning, design, and testing. The BRS team collaborated with experts from Clear Global and The Tech Innovators Network Kenya (THiNK), to design and build a chatbot that could handle a range of queries related to business registration. The chatbot was designed to be user-friendly, with a simple interface and a conversational tone to make it easy for users to engage with it.
Training Workshop for the Business Registration Service for the AI Conversational Chatbot (27th to 3rd March, 2023),Naivasha, Kenya.
The team worked on building a robust backend infrastructure to ensure the bot could handle a large volume of queries with ease. This includes designing a natural language processing (NLP) engine to ensure that the bot understands and responds to queries accurately.
Presently, the chatbot can process questions in English, Swahili and Sheng, a version of Kenyan Slang.’ This component was a deliberate effort to be more inclusive of the youth who make 85 percent of the Kenyan population.
Since its soft launch on 23rd June 2022, the chatbot has been up and running for a few months, with almost 78 percent of interactions initiated through the revamped BRS website. The team has observed an increase in usage of the bot, highlighting the demand for such a service.
Moving forward, the BRS team plans to improve the responsiveness of the Bot. The team will continue to gather feedback from users to improve the Bot’s responsiveness, functionality and make it even more user-friendly.
A response from the bot on the BRS website
In conclusion, the development of an AI conversational chatbot by the BRS is an excellent example of how Artificial Intelligence can be leveraged to provide better customer service within government by providing timely and accurate information.
Here at THiNK, we are very glad to have been part of a team (guided by Clear Global, with support of GIZ) to implement such a milestone in BRS’ digital transformation journey.
