#CloseUp interview with ViLTe Bot
Last week The Government of Lithuania has welcomed one more innovation. In order to facilitate the provision of reliable information to the public in the face of COVID-19 crisis, an automated conversation robot called ViLTė was installed at www.koronastop.lt. The ViLTė solution was worked out during the Hack the Crisis hackathon – it was evaluated by the commission as one of the best hackathon solutions.
We were curious about how this chatbot will help the society, so we have interviewed one of the creators of ViLTė – Marcos Daniel Martinez to learn more.
Why is ViLTė important to the community, how will it help people?
ViLTė is a state virtual agent, a chatbot powered by AI, that can understand different types of questions about this crisis and provide people with official information in Lithuanian or English to guarantee trustworthy and accurate answers. During this unique crisis, people have hundreds of questions but don’t really know where to get the answers. There are just too many different sources of information and sometimes fake news spread even faster than the virus. ViLTė responds to thousands of citizens at the same time on topics like coronavirus, travel restrictions, state support for businesses, unemployment, education, services status and more.
How this solution will facilitate the work of the public sector?
ViLTė will take the heavy load so public employees and volunteers can focus on the difficult questions where we humans make a difference, leaving the machines to help with the rest. This will be a long battle against an invisible enemy. A battle better fought with accurate information andViLTėwill be there to help to fight this together.
This will be a long battle against an invisible enemy. A battle better fought with accurate information and ViLTė will be there to help to fight this together. – Marcos Daniel Martinez
Any other interesting facts/elements about the creation of ViLTė?
State virtual agent ViLTė was one of the ideas from Hack the Crisis, a hackathon organized by GovTech Lab (part of MITA), LitBAN, and Vilnius Tech Park. ViLTė is very young (several days old) but will get smarter fast – the more conversations it has with citizens, the wiser it will get.
