Tech solutions company, Synthesis announced on Tuesday, 17 December 2019, that it will soon officially launch its tailored technology platform that will enable millions of citizens to communicate with all arms of the South African government – ‘GovChat’. GovChat has been appointed as the official citizen engagement platform for such purpose.
The platform aims to enable citizens to report and rate government service delivery, record service faults and weaknesses and enable service providers, civil servants and ward councillors to track such claims and complaints and follow-up on remedial actions.
This project began approximately two months ago thanks to the scalable services from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Thanks to AWS, the platform should meet the expected demand and growth in adoption, enabling the country’s 50 million citizens to extract maximum benefits and satisfaction through its use.
The GovChat vision was to create a cloud-based, chatbot-assisted platform that would cater for multiple communication channels for government, its citizens and for broader society, but without the development skills and capacity.
Synthesis has accordingly built a chatbot driven by natural language interactions, leveraging deep cloud expertise on AWS and powered by machine learning. The chatbot guides the user seamlessly through the communication process, from selecting the nature of the query through to flagging the issue by dropping a pin on a digital map.
“The Synthesis team used AWS’ agile progression methodologies and cloud provisioning to produce the solution. We simultaneously ran development, test and production environments, using cloud computing capabilities. This allowed us to quickly move from “idea” to “minimum viable product” and get a first functioning iteration of the platform within the tight deadline,” says Naseem Ahmed, the Synthesis Project Leader.
Ahmed further explains, “The GovChat service needs to cater for all citizens – people with different levels of literacy and language proficiency and who will use mobile devices of varying sophistication. Synthesis designed a chatbot that will provide a consistent and simple interaction experience across a variety of communication channels”.
The GovChat citizen reporting solution is currently in pilot at two South African municipalities and will likely go live nationally early in 2020.
Edited by Jenna Delport
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