South Africa for the past decade has been one of the leading technological countries in Africa. The country\continues to develop their potentials through new creative technologies.
A Tech solutions company, Synthesis announced in the last days of 2019, that it will soon officially be launching its technology platform that will enable about 50 millionof South African citizens to communicate with all arms of the South African government.
The platform is called ‘GovChat’, which has been appointed as the official citizen engagement platform for better governance reasons.
According to Synthesis, the platform aims to enable citizens to report and rate government service delivery, record service faults and weaknesses and enable service providers, civil servants and ward councilors to track such claims and complaints and follow-up on remedial actions.
The project that started about two months ago is almost ready, will be powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is expected to meet the targeted audience of 50 million. The platform is expected to be available for use in the early 2020.
The company has accordingly built a chat bot driven by natural language interactions, leveraging deep cloud expertise on Amazon Web Service and powered by machine learning. The chat bot guides the user seamlessly through the communication process, from selecting the nature of the query through to flagging the issue by dropping a pin on a digital map.
According to Naseem Ahmed who is the project manager,
“The Synthesis team used AWS’ agile progression methodologies and cloud provisioning to produce the solution. We simultaneously ran development, test and production environments, using cloud computing capabilities. This allowed us to quickly move from “idea” to “minimum viable product” and get a first functioning iteration of the platform within the tight deadline,”
Ahmed also explains that,
“The ‘GovChat‘ service needs to cater for all citizens – people with different levels of literacy and language proficiency and who will use mobile devices of varying sophistication. Synthesis designed a chatbot that will provide a consistent and simple interaction experience across a variety of communication channels”.
This initiative might make overall governance a bitmore complex but it will definitely help the government know how good or bad they are with governance as it will also give them the chance to understand the citizen’sexpectations.
