Public services
A telephone counter that says which papers to bring.
The most common call to a local authority has exactly one useful answer: the list of documents and the counter opening hours. It is public information, already written in a document, repeated daily by an officer who has something else to do. That is the automatable part, and roughly all of it.
The assistant answers counter hours, the documents required for a request and the steps of a procedure, reading from documents you publish yourself, takes reports as tickets, and routes the rest to the right department. It issues no documents and takes no fees.
What rings on a council switchboard
A public service has a rare advantage: almost every answer is already public, so reading it out on the phone raises no confidentiality problem at all.
Counter hours and addresses
Which counter, at what hours, in which building. The leading cause of a wasted journey.
Required documents
The complete list for a particular request, in the order it is submitted.
The steps of a procedure
What happens after submission, how long it takes, where the result is collected.
Reports
A pothole, street lighting, stray dogs, refuse. Opened as a ticket with the exact address.
Routing to departments
The caller says what they need and reaches the right department, without three transfers.
From a question to a quoted answer
The rule of this flow is that the assistant quotes rather than composes. In a public institution, an invented answer about a procedure is a real problem for the citizen.
- 01 Establish what they need to do Not which department they want, but what they have to get done. A citizen does not know the org chart and should not have to.
- 02 Search the published documents A knowledge base query over your own regulations and notices. Knowledge-only mode stops it answering from anything else.
- 03 Say it does not know, when it does not When no suitable passage is found, the call receives the knowledge-insufficient event and the assistant routes to a person rather than improvising.
- 04 Open a ticket for reports With the exact address and description, in your ticketing system or as a row in a sheet.
- 05 Route the rest To the right department, with the context gathered carried across.
What stays documented
In a public institution, proof that a call was taken and what was answered has a value of its own, separate from resolving it.
| The report ticket | With the address, the description, the phone number and the time, in Zendesk or Freshdesk. |
|---|---|
| The routing | Which department it transferred to, as structured output, which shows over time where the volume goes. |
| The unanswered questions | The knowledge-insufficient events, which are in effect the list of what should be published more clearly. |
| On the call record | The transcript, with the retention period you set, in your own storage if you configure it that way. |
What it does not do for a public body
A public service cannot delegate any administrative act to an automated system, and this product is not built as though it could.
- It issues no documents It produces no certificates, permits or attestations, and does not confirm that a request was approved.
- It takes no fees It processes no payments and connects to no local tax payment system.
- It makes no administrative decisions It does not interpret a rule, does not say whether somebody is entitled to something, and gives no deadline that is not written in your documents.
- No link to the registry There is no connector for the document management or registry systems used in public administration. Any link is written as your own HTTP tool.
- It signs nothing electronically It neither produces nor verifies electronic signatures, in any form.
What institutions ask us
Do citizens accept talking to an automated system?
Better than they accept an engaged tone, on one condition: that it says what it is up front and offers a person immediately. A telephone counter that hides what it is produces exactly the distrust an institution does not need.
What happens to callers data?
Transcripts and recordings can be written straight into your own storage, with a configured retention period and scheduled deletion. What is collected is decided by you in the prompt, and the recommendation is to collect as little as possible: a list of documents needs no personal data at all.
Can it work in several languages?
Yes, with one assistant per language on the same number. For localities with Hungarian or German speakers this matters practically. The language is pinned explicitly on the assistant rather than guessed.
How is the information kept current?
By changing the documents in the knowledge base. Nothing is rebuilt. And the knowledge-insufficient events show you monthly which questions your published material does not cover.
Where to go next
Telephony
Numbers, trunks, dial plan, queues, operators and campaigns, in one system.
Knowledge base
Upload, chunking, vectors in Postgres, and knowledge-only mode.
Security
Isolation, roles, audit, redaction, your own storage. And an honest list of the gaps.
Pricing
Components at their published price, the platform on top, and what we cannot price yet.
Notes
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1
The tools named on this page are the ones in
App\Services\Integrations\ConnectorRegistrycarryingimplemented. Anything that is only in the catalogue, without that flag, is not named here as though it worked. - 2 Knowledge-only mode stops the assistant answering from anything other than the indexed documents. It is described in the knowledge-base guide.