Chatbot: Muni or Kiri?

The two most popular chatbots on the market at the moment are Kiri and Muni. Two chatbots that resemble each other in many ways provide a better user experience for the citizens and can relieve the municipality's employees in civil service. At Kruso, we have gained a lot of experience with establishing both chatbots.

Kiri comes from Norway, where she has been tested in 60 Norwegian municipalities with great success. The chatbot is based on artificial intelligence and an advanced machine learning platform. The Norwegian municipalities entered into a partnership with Boost.ai, which specialises in virtual assistants. Kiri is made up of questions and answers on topics many citizens turn to. Furthermore, this also means that Kiri can not answer all the questions, but she is constantly in training.

By continuously training and further developing the chatbot, Kiri will be optimised to answer similar questions in the future based on the questions that are asked. Thus, Kiri is a chatbot that gets smarter and smarter with time.

The chatbot is in many ways similar to a real person, who, in addition to being able to answer individual questions, can also understand the context in which the questions are asked. Thus, Kiri knows how to conduct a normal conversation based on the user's conversation flow with a chatbot and therefore understands where the user wants the conversation to lead. Thus, Kiri can provide a concrete and helpful answer.

The Digital Hotline and IBM Watson are behind the development of Muni. The Digital Hotline assists citizens by telephone across municipal boundaries with navigation on the digital self-service solutions and general questions.

36 municipalities have already implemented the chatbot, and in addition, 42 municipalities have entered into a connection agreement for the project. The goal is to create a channel that ensures citizens get their questions answered without clicking around confused for long periods.

Muni works primarily on the basis of a 'question and answer level', but high efforts are being made to make the chatbot more flexible and versatile so that it can help citizens with a broader range of questions. Despite Muni's early start only covering four areas, she can now cover more than 20 areas. The next step for Muni is integration into underlying professional systems and self-service solutions, which will give citizens a more personal interaction with the chatbot.

A chatbot has two clear benefits that benefit both the municipality's employees and citizens. Chatbots are a concrete and effective way to relieve the municipality's employees in civil service, as they can then spend less time answering basic questions and thus focus on more critical and demanding tasks. At the same time, citizens get the opportunity to get quick answers to their inquiries and help access and navigate around the website 24 hours a day. In the past, both citizens and employees have spent time on lengthy correspondences via email or telephone, which has been time-consuming for both parties.

At Kruso, we have implemented chatbots for several municipalities with great success. If your municipality has not yet entered the chatbot universe and wants to know more about how it can benefit your municipality, do not hesitate to contact us.