The Singapore government ran a chatbot hackathon. Here are the winning ideas.

Government websites can be made more personal. There’s a trove of information on them, but the information is under so many layers that citizens get frustrated with trying to navigate around the sites.

Some users may prefer chatting with someone as a way to locate the information. Others may not like to, or cannot use, a keyboard.

To push the development of virtual assistants that’ll add a touch of personality to government websites, the Government Technology Agency (GovTech) and Microsoft co-organized the inaugural Botfest 2016.

Happy, chatty faces galore at the Botfest prize presentation.

Designed for government officers, the hackathon provided an avenue for agencies to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve real challenges they’re facing. Nine teams were given training by Microsoft and had four days to build a chatbot using the Microsoft development environment and Microsoft Bot Framework.

All teams were then invited to present their projects.

The winning ideas

Springing into first place was SPRING Singapore’s web chat app which lets entrepreneurs retrieve information about investors and connect with them.

The Ministry of Health’s (MOH) chatbot, which was the runner-up, provides users with information on procedures and other considerations that would determine their medical fees at both private and public hospitals.

In third place was the Singapore Examination and Assessment Board’s chatbot, which lets pupils pull publicly-available information about exam dates, times, syllabi and venues, as well as the distance from their current location to the exam venue.

MOH team member Terry Lim said that his team’s motivation for their chatbot was the “overwhelming” information available on MOH’s website.

“While an Internet search may provide links to various tables of procedures and costs from the MOH website that users have to figure out, the bot was built first to understand layman term equivalents of medical terms such as colonoscopy and cataract surgery,” he explains.

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