In 2011, the IBM Watson supercomputer was mopping the floor with two of Jeopardy’s most decorated players in an exhibition match. Now, the artificial-intelligence technology is helping the citizens of Surrey make bylaw complaints or contact animal control.
The Lower Mainland’s second-largest and fastest-growing city has become the first municipality in the world to employ IBM’s (NYSE:IBM) groundbreaking technology, and city officials are hoping it helps streamline its business services as well.
“The content that went into Watson was initially acquired by scraping our website,” said Sean Simpson, the City of Surrey’s acting information technology manager. “And we are tuning it weekly so it learns. So every time we ask a question of it and it doesn’t return the answer that we’re expecting, I tell it so. So something that might not be working very well this week will certainly be working next week.”
Simpson said typical users of the service would be people applying for business licences and permits and those wanting to know the status of their applications.
IBM Watson is offered through a new app called My Surrey, through which users ask questions much as if they were calling 311, the non-emergency number used by many municipalities as a means for the public to contact local government. Simpson said the more questions are asked, the better Watson becomes at offering the most efficient answer.
“What we like about Watson compared to, say, Google (Nasdaq:GOOG) search, is it gives you one answer as opposed to a listing of results that you need to then go through,” he said. “If I ask it right now, ‘How do I get a dog licence?’ it gives me the answer, and just one answer.”
Elizabeth Model, chief executive officer of the Downtown Surrey Business Improvement Association, said the group is excited about the new toy now at its disposal.
“This cutting-edge technology rolled into a business-friendly application certainly makes it much easier and far more efficient for businesses and residences in Surrey to ask specific questions and report issues,” Model said. “In our fast-paced, busy world, having information in seconds is vital to business and growth. The City of Surrey is working diligently to be a world-class leader in technology.”
As part of the pilot project, IBM Watson has been trained to understand questions concerning a variety of business-related city services including bylaws, building and construction, engineering infrastructure and property taxes. The city is also exploring possible integration of Watson into its website. Simpson said the main hurdle for Watson is learning to answer one question that’s posed in multiple ways.
“We are meeting weekly with [IBM] to review feedback so hopefully people will say, ‘This answer did not meet my question.’ We’re going to be going through that to see if there are patterns and themes, but because it’s natural language we have to ask the same question many different ways so that they all match the one answer.”
