Using chatbots and life events to provide public service information

A main objective of eGovernment is the provision of user-centric public services (PS) in a personalized and user-friendly way. Life events (LE) have been proposed as an intuitive method for personalised and integrated PS provision. A technology that could be employed for providing personalised PS and LE information is chatbots, which however is currently unexploited. The aim of this paper is twofold: (a) to present an architecture for the integration of chatbot technology and LE for better PS information provision and (b) to implement a proof-of-concept chatbot prototype that exploits LE information available at the Greek eGovernment portal ERMIS. As a result, we propose a layered architecture consisting of four layers, namely graphical user interface, chatbot engine, application programming interface and linked data repositories. A chatbot pilot is implemented based on the proposed architecture. Two usage scenarios of this pilot are demonstrated and evaluated using a TAM based questionnaire. Benefits and challenges are also discussed.