Blue Alpaca

BlueAlpaca is a conversational information service (chatbot) that makes IoT-based information and Smart City services, easily accessible and usable by citizens.

Let’s face the truth: when it comes to search for information and services provided by the public administration, most people spend quite a lot of time surfing on the Internet, searching for keywords on the municipality’s website, going back and forth, to end up frustrated and giving up. The last resort: calling the public administration contact center in the hope that someone on the other end of the line can help them out. Why? Long story short, in most of the cases, people have scarce domain knowledge, bureaucratic jargon often sounds gobbledygook and, just to make things more difficult, website interfaces of public administrations are usually terribly complicated and cumbersome to navigate.

Smart Cities thrive on the collection, analysis, and distribution of large amounts of data from the city. This might include climate, traffic, waste, events, health data, mobility, water quality, swimming information, social opportunities and more.

A continuing challenge for the Smart City is the means by which this information and data is made available to the citizens. Typically it is accessed (if at all) via a small number of isolated outlets, very specific to their purpose and niche.

The challenge here is to create a flexible information source for many citizens, providing diverse information in a usable way.