City of Oulu’s successful innovation project OuluBot moves to production

Over the past three years, The City of Oulu has been working on OuluBot, an innovation project funded by Business Finland. OuluBot’s development work and test-use are now completed, and the project is moving to production. Collaboratively responsible for the project delivery are Digital Workforce, an intelligent automation services company, and Front AI, which specializes in automation solutions that utilize conversational artificial intelligence.

OuluBot is Finland’s first digital customer service agent that combines AI and software robotics. It provides residents with extensive and multichannel information 24/7. In addition, OuluBot can independently handle many service requests and personalized information, such as reporting a lost travel card or suggesting nearby events based on location. In the future, citizens may also be able to ask OuluBot about the progress of their building permit applications.

“Feedback from our employees and citizens has been very positive. OuluBot can correctly answer up to 80 percent of questions concerning, for example, public transport, berths, tourism, parking, and Oulu Self-Care. The more OuluBot is used, the better it learns. Our trained experts, so-called bot whisperers, are responsible for teaching the bot”,

says Veli-Matti Keloneva, Development Director of the City of Oulu.

OuluBot’s thorough development work aimed to produce innovations and solutions that better serve residents’ needs – this was a great success.

“OuluBot is one of the most comprehensive implementations of Conversational AI in Finland. It contains over 3000 intents. OuluBot has a mobile user interface that allows end users to access all content easily. Numerous innovations have emerged along the way. For example, a cluster analysis at the beginning of the project allowed the algorithm to independently pull from old chat conversations about half of the data required for teaching the bot. Utilizing location information for a bot is also a first in the Nordic countries”,

says Jari Annala, CEO of Front AI.

“OuluBot is unique not only in the public sector but also in the entire Nordic market. This is an excellent example of a project where close collaboration between the customer and suppliers has led to a successful new kind of solution”,

says Teemu Vieruaho, Head of Intelligent Automation, Digital Workforce.

In the future OuluBot will also feature voice control, authentication and personalized services for end-users, and new location-based services.

“To ensure continuous development of OuluBot we have established Outo, a cross-functional, value-driven and human centered operating model for our customer service development”,

tells Veli-Matti Keloneva.

OuluBot operates at https://www.ouka.fi/ and can also chat in the local dialect.

More information

Development Director Veli-Matti Keloneva, City of Oulu, tel. 044 703 1261
CEO Jari Annala, Front AI, jari.annala@front.ai tel. 0400 338 585
Head of Intelligent Automation Teemu Vieruaho, Digital Workforce, teemu.vieruaho@digitalworkforce.com tel. 050 520 3853

About Digital Workforce
Digital Workforce is one of the leading service providers specialising in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Intelligent Automation (IA) on an industrial scale in terms of revenue, service offering, client references and head count. Digital Workforce helps its customers to automate knowledge work tasks and business processes with IA through its Digital Workers. Digital Workers are software robots that are in essence automated team members that execute business processes precisely, tirelessly and with fewer mistakes than human workers – with no significant changes to the customer’s existing systems. Digital workers have superpowers based on RPA, Artificial intelligence, and cloud services, which make them fast and efficient.
More information available at https://digitalworkforce.com

Front AI
Front AI automates customer and employee touchpoints with local natural language and AI. Front AI specializes in Conversational AI services and is proud of its superior customer satisfaction (NPS 97). The company has delivered over 30 Conversational AI projects in the Nordics. Founded in 2019, Front AI employs over 20 natural language and AI professionals in Finland, Sweden and Denmark. https://front.ai