Elgin to provide AI chatbot for residents to engage via text, web chat
Elgin plans to harness the power of generative artificial intelligence to make it easier for residents to engage with the city via web chat and text messaging and receive real-time answers.
The city council gave preliminary approval Wednesday to a contract with Citibot.io to provide web and text-based chat services that use the city’s source information.
While the information from the chatbot is sourced from the city’s website, Elgin’s chief technology officer Aaron Cosentino acknowledged the site can be difficult to navigate and contains a lot of jargon with which residents might not be familiar.
“Residents shouldn’t have to know our language in order to get their answers,” Cosentino said.
In addition to working around the bureaucratic lingo and legalese in English, the chatbot can communicate in 71 languages.
The chatbot option is considerably cheaper than using live online chat, which the city estimated could cost more than $150,000 annually.
The three-year contract with Citibot is under $30,000 for the first year and then goes down to $21,600 and $23,300, respectively, for the next two years.
Citibot will offer both web-based and text-based AI chat. The web-based will be in the form of a widget in the corner of the city’s website. When interactions with the chatbot require human intervention, such as a service request, the “conversations” are immediately sent as a 311 request.
The company will work with city staff to build in the most common “scripts,” allowing the bot to collect specific information based on the direction of the conversation. If, for example, a resident asks about a down tree branch, the bot will know to ask for the address and if the branch is blocking the street.
The company will help the city market the bot.
It’s not Elgin’s first foray into using AI. In October 2023, the city council approved an agreement with a company that uses AI to review high-resolution images of the city’s street network to measure ADA ramp slopes. The city’s antivirus software also uses machine learning, as do services employed by the Elgin Police Department for aggregating publicly available information in the investigative process.