Culture
The Easiest Way to Navigate Municipal Websites: A Super Smart Computer
Turns out, IBM’s Watson is not just for beating humans at Jeopardy!
Local government websites are notoriously difficult to navigate. If you don’t know the right words to describe your service request, you end up clicking from department to department, stumbling through a bureaucratic no man’s land you might have avoided by Googling your issue instead.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The city of Surrey, British Columbia, has heard your cries and souped up its municipal app to respond to 3-1-1 requests the way real people phrase them: as questions. Powered by IBM’s Watson computing system—which famously defeated humanity on Jeopardy!—the My Surrey app is the first of its kind to interpret natural language and reply with information on city services.