Meet Oggie our new chatbot

Bridgend County Borough Council has launched a new Chatbot on its website to enable residents to communicate with the council in English or Welsh, day or night.

The Chatbot, named Oggie by staff and local people following a competition via social media, uses artificial intelligence and learns about the questions people ask most often to develop quicker and better responses, releasing contact centre staff to focus on dealing with the more complex queries.

Oggie has been programmed to help with questions ranging from “What can I recycle”, “When are the school holidays?” and queries relating to waste, schools, blue badges, council tax, housing, environmental reporting and school transport. This was based on the most frequently asked questions that our customer contact staff answer over the phones and on social media.

We want to give our residents the choice in how they want to engage with us and improve their customer experience. The Chatbot will complement our contact centre, social media channels and website as another way for people to engage with their local council. Oggie is constantly evolving and learning how to answer residents’ frequently-asked questions, and is available day or night. This means contact centre staff have more time to solve with more complex needs - such as homelessness.

Oggie replies to everyone in Welsh or English to give people in Bridgend the choice of how they would like to communicate with the council and we’re very excited about this new initiative. I would encourage everyone to speak to Oggie as the more replies and answers it learns, the faster we’re going to be able to provide people with the information they want, when they want it.

We are constantly innovating in Bridgend and it has been wonderful working with South Wales tech company, We Build Bots, to expand our digital capability into machine learning and artificial intelligence. I would like to thank our colleagues who are working with Oggie to ensure that responsiveness improves all the time.

The Leader of Bridgend County Borough Council, Councillor Huw David

Residents can access Oggie via our website home page.