Synthesis, a tech solutions company plans to officially launch ‘GovChat’, the official citizen engagement platform in South Africa. It is a tailored technology platform that will enable millions of citizens to communicate with the various arms of the government.
GovChat aims to enable citizens to report and rate government service delivery. This will enable service providers, civil servants and ward councillors to track, take action and follow-up on complaints. Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosted the platform two months ago.
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Synthesis created GovChat as a cloud-based Chatbot-assisted platform that provides multiple communication channels between the government and the citizens. The chatbot is powered by machine learning, natural language interactions and deep cloud expertise on AWS. It guides the user seamlessly through selecting the nature of the query to flagging the issue by dropping a pin on a digital map.
“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,” says Naseem Ahmed, the Synthesis Project Leader.
He further explained that the GovChat caters to the needs of all citizens, irrespective of literacy and language proficiency. As it is designed to provide a consistent and simple interaction experience across a variety of communication channels. Users can visit the site via mobile devices of varying sophistication. GovChat is currently in pilot at two municipalities and will go live nationally by early 2020.
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