The private residential tenancy gives tenants and landlords more rights and responsibilities and more security in their own home. Shelter Scotland, a homeless and housing charity recently partnered with hackathon organisers Product Forge, to bring the Scottish tech scene together to collaborate on solving issues around homelessness, the private rental sector and getting on the property ladder. After Sheldon, the charity went on to create ‘Ask Ailsa’. Checks if we have a live chat operator available if so provide the link to chat, If a live chat person isn’t available, she’ll check if our helpline is open and provide the number if it is. Responsibilities included: Created highly accessible front-end code to serve hundreds of thousands of users, reducing existing page load times by over 75% NEW HOUSE RULES. Advisers are available to respond to more urgent queries.”. Shelter Scotland Scotiabank House 6 South Charlotte Street Edinburgh EH2 4AW. The last session that I attended at the Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference last week was entitled ‘Chatbots are so hot’. The lab would benefit from the expertise of Shelter’s internal experts from a variety of teams including: Children’s Legal Services, digital, UX and tech teams, and the Shelter Scotland … While they weren’t against using a chatbot, they couldn’t help but think that important information is being left out. You can use “off the shelf” products like ChatFuel to power the questions and answers, or Microsoft provide a bot framework to build a bot that can integrate with your website or with Facebook messenger. 27 March 2018, Those that haven’t been successful were redirected to contact us for help via live chat, the phone or our website. The high rent for some houses forces people to look for housing in less desirable areas, which can be both inconvenient and dangerous. Each question typed by a user gets mapped to an answer in the LUIS. [Beta. Ailsa, another housing advice chatbot at Shelter Scotland, tells people who she (it?) ... and the Shelter Scotland digital team. The Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016 came into force on 1 December 2017, introducing a new 'private residential tenancy'. NEWS: Chatbots.org survey on 3000 US and UK consumers shows it is time for chatbot integration in customer service!read more.. The concept behind Sheldon, Ailsa’s predecessor, was to create a bot that would theoretically be able to answer people’s queries about private tenants’ rights in Scotland. They are Scotland High School, which has a history of being opened most frequently in the past 25 years. Get advice. 999 were tasked with helping Shelter Scotland communicate changes to housing legislation affecting landlords and tenants.. As part of the New House Rules campaign, New Now developed a chatbot using the Microsoft Bot Framework, able to answer tenants’ and landlords’ queries about the new Private Residential Tenancy. Developed on Shelter’s standalone website, this new bot is rooted in problem-solving rather than fundraising or general awareness. Back in December, the lovely Rachel R turned me onto … This guide explains how to go about getting housing from the council or a registered social landlord (a housing association or housing cooperative) How do I get a social rented tenancy? As Keith Bartholomew, Senior Digital Officer at Shelter Scotland said: "The chatbot allows people to self-serve and find out the information online, rather than phone our helpline. What are the changes that are being introduced? In the case of one user, they disliked the rise of robots in our world. It doesn’t allow the user to veer off script, and it also doesn’t take any free text questions. It has helped a significant number of people get to grips with the legislation changes, without us getting a large volume of calls to our helpline. 6 South Charlotte Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4AW For real-time communication using text What it does This is a type of online chat where users type their query into a ‘chatbox’ and get a response in real time. The first incarnation of Shelter’s bot scheme was initially conceived at a hackathon. Do you think a chatbot can help your organisation deliver a better service? Ally Housing Chatbot. It is often seen as simple and accessible as users do not need … Continue reading “Webchat” Social Housing. Co-production in action: How our group in Dundee successfully pushed for change in their city. In the first phase of this project, 999 worked with New Now to deliver a chatbot, using a guided conversation style, that was able to answer tenants’ and landlords’ queries about the new Private Residential Tenancy. In the case of the Shelter Scotland, and these chatbots, the question to explore is what body of knowledge are they based upon? I'm Ally. A chatbot to tackle housing problems. We worked with them to develop a creative concept and design approach - plus a digital solution in the form of a friendly chatbot - to handle a huge upsurge in questions following a change in legislation. Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation, and other new technologies are already having an impact upon our organisations, our jobs, and our lives. Social Housing. During our own testing, we squashed some obvious bugs to do with the flow of questions and the placement of buttons, but one thing that surprised me was that some users just wouldn’t engage with a bot. Northern Marine Group . It offers important answers to people that need housing and helps them apply for a housing program. Another preferred long-form content which covers the topic in its entirety. All things considered, an FAQ bot is pretty limited in what it can answer. This started life, explains Chatbots Magazine, as ‘Sheldon’ .. a conversational bot that sits in messenger platforms acting as an intermediary between the user and Shelter Staff. However, the charity has since decided it is keen to develop the bot further. This article is not about us, how amazing we are, and the cool stuff we have built. 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Financial Times . Granted these were more in-depth queries, but still, the bot did a pretty good job of keeping our lines free for more in-depth and emergency queries. Shelter Scotland’s new chatbot Ailsa has had 4,000 interactions in its first four months significantly reducing the volume of enquires to the charity’s helpline. With this in mind, Ailsa tries to answer the question but if she doesn’t know the answer she does one of three things: It’s easy to build your bot and squirrel away showcasing your creation to the world for a “ta-da moment”, but from experience that hardly ever works out as planned. However, sometimes we will delete a comment, or hold it in a moderation queue which will delay it being published. Project: Campaign Identity and Chatbot Client: Shelter Scotland Design: 999 Design. The first incarnation of Shelter’s bot scheme was initially conceived at a hackathon. It covered presentations on ATJ Bot on Tennessee’s Help4TN website, coloured blue and also Chicago’s Rentervention bot, coloured red as above and previously covered in an earlier post. We developed the app using a nodeJS back end which plugs into Microsoft’s Azure bot framework and LUIS as the natural language processing model. Shelter Scotland is the leading charity providing advice and advocacy to people living in private rented property across the country. Our COVID Q&A with Watson is an AI-powered chatbot that addresses consumers' questions and concerns about COVID-19. To engage Scottish tenants and landlords with new legislation coming into effect in 2017, Shelter Scotland received a government grant to generate awareness around the reforms. Ailwyn worked as the primary developer in the Shelter Scotland head office, coordinating front-end development. Shelter invited us to conduct a five-day UX Lab at their offices in Old Street to research, design and test ideas for the new product. Shelter Scotland Mar 2017 to Jun 2019Edinburgh, United Kingdom. People found the chatbot useful, but we wanted to see if people would respond better to a bot that processed natural language. I debated whether or not to include charity: water’s chatbot into this list, as it’s among … From our chatbot Ailsa’s interactions, only 5.5% of the audience asked for contact details of the Shelter Scotland helpline which means that of those who contact Shelter Scotland by initiating the chatbot, there was a 94.5% reduction in calls to the helpdesk, reducing pressure on the helpline to deal with more Does someone in Glasgow ask a question the same way as someone in Aberdeen? It’s important to consider your audience before you start planning your bot project. Shelter Scotland free housing advice helpline 0808 800 4444 (Mon-Fri 9-5). The Azure platform also has a nice interface where you can assign questions that the model couldn’t quite figure out, in effect training the model to improve over time. Authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority, Scotland’s new private residential tenancy, Shelter Scotland’s 3-point plan gets the go-ahead. I'm here to make complicated things easy. Shelter Scotland has an advice line for advisers called ScotWRAS. Keith Bartholomew, Senior Digital Officer at Shelter Scotland said that Ailsa was currently in stage two of development, which will introduce natural language programming and allow for a greater number of queries. This article is not about numbers, stats, and figures surrounding the chatbot industry (although I will use some to support my point here and there).. How does that knowledge accurately reflect all of the ecosystem of the organizations who provide services relevant to that need? I don’t think that a chatbot can replace a real person, especially when providing essential advice but it can certainly help answer some of the basic questions your users might have, freeing up time for your advisers to answer more urgent queries. It's built on the IBM Watson Ads … What is Chatbot Adoption Really About This article is not about features or benefits of a chatbot. But heart singing moments are still worthy of comment, so i'll write this review based on that. Shelter Scotland was commissioned by the Scottish Government at the end of 2017 to raise awareness of Scotland’s new private residential tenancy to landlords and tenants. Since its launch last October, the chatbot has been used 4,380 times, which has significantly reduced the strain on the charity’s helplines. The language model does a pretty good job of routing questions to answers and it deals well with misspellings and truncated questions. 94 likes. By chatting to me you can get instant advice 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Shelter Scotland . Talk to me: Increased civic engagement © Shelter Scotland 2017 The transcripts also show us when demand for the service is, and so far, we’ve had a few chats outside of our opening hours, which if done right can provide an essential life line to people when there isn’t a real person available. Shelter is a registered charity that campaigns to end homelessness and bad housing in England and Scotland.It gives advice, information and advocacy to people in need, and tackles the root causes of bad housing by lobbying government and local authorities for new laws and policies to improve the lives of homeless and badly housed people. The above are both being run by staff who are now WFH. Not Serious.] We programmed Ailsa to answer the simple questions about the new tenancy, things like: In the 3 months that we ran the campaign, there were over 6500 interactions with Ailsa to find answers. 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