SentiOne Introduces Free Brexit FAQ Chatbot
A European conversational AI company, SentiOne, announced today the launch of its Brexit FAQ Bot. It is a generative artificial intelligence online tool, that will help people in the UK and around the world navigate the impact of Brexit on every aspect of life. This is likely the first publicly available tool that combines conversational AI with GPT technology. The Brexit FAQ Bot (beta) was launched to mark SentiOne’s entry into the UK market. It is available for free at www.brexitbot.co.uk.
To create the tool, SentiOne analysed over 650 most popular Brexit-related questions from Google. The Brexit FAQ Bot is capable of providing users with information on 40 topics, including travel, pensions, healthcare access, impact on immigration, residency requirements for EU citizens living in the UK and Britons living in the EU. SentiOne plans to develop the tool in the future.
The bot is also taught to answer questions regarding the history of Britain’s relationship with the EU, the Brexit referendum and its aftermath, negotiations leading to the UK’s formal and factual departure from the European Union, and biographies of people – politicians, campaigners, and people of influence – who were involved in the seven-year-long process. For the Bot, as for the experts, the most difficult questions are related to the consequences of Brexit and the ongoing debate about the future of the UK’s relations with the bloc.
Finally, users can engage with the bot on a lighter note and request it to provide Brexit-related jokes and puns which went viral on Twitter in recent years.
The bot is a free and easily accessible platform for individuals to interact with and seek answers to their Brexit-related queries. Whether users search for information, comments or specific documents, the Brexit FAQ Bot will be their one-stop solution for accurate and reliable Brexit knowledge – said Agnes Uba, Head of Marketing at SentiOne.
The technology behind Brexit FAQ Bot
Brexit FAQ Bot is based on SentiOne’s advanced NLU (Natural Language Understanding) engine. Every day, SentiOne’s AI algorithms collect and analyse 150 million posts, comments and opinions from public domains (social media, forums, news sites, blogs), which allow them to understand human intentions with 94% accuracy. The Brexit Bot was designed to focus the tool on facts, and to independently interpret information and embed it in context. It is familiar with colloquial speech and slang, and understands synonymous expressions. It does not hallucinate or invent answers – all its statements are based on content that has been moderated and kept up to date of August 3rd.
Brexit FAQ Bot employs SentiOne’s proprietary NLU models, tailored and trained on billions of conversations for the past 12 years. The creators of Brexit FAQ Bot provided the engine with a knowledge base – a database of official documents and verified sources, including data and analysis from the European Commission, the UK Government, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the House of Commons Library, the Office for National Statistics (ONS), and others. Brexit FAQ Bot also refers to verified commercial and think-tank sources, including YouGov polls and analysis from the UK In a Changing Europe.
We did our best for it to give as accurate and detailed answers as possible. Development of the Brexit FAQ Bot was an incredibly challenging task due to the scope of subjects affected by Britain’s decision to leave the EU – said Andrew Frycowski, Head of Conversational AI Design at SentiOne. He added: Normally, we work with clients who require a generative AI chatbot bot capable of answering queries related to their services and internal procedures, which by definition limits the range of subjects and does not involve issues which are still debated. We took this task to showcase that SentiOne can develop a bot capable of providing detailed and accurate answers about something as complex and far-reaching as Brexit. Thus, I must underline that the Brexit FAQ Bot was created in about one month and is still a beta version.
Employing generative AI technology to solve specific query
Brexit FAQ Bot is the first tool in which SentiOne combined conversational AI with GPT technology. This hybrid approach allowed the Bot to generate answers from a large database in a live webchat.
Brexit FAQ Bot is likely the first publicly available chatbot using GPT technology to solve a specific-use case. SentiOne did not write the answers for the bot – the tool generates them independently. When a user asks “can I retire in Spain”?, the bot searches its databases for a relevant document, identifies the paragraph covering retirement, and only then writes an answer – in a natural, informal way – just the way a friend would answer the question.
That is the future of chatbots – they need to provide accurate answers by interpreting large, complex documents, policy regulations, terms of service, bank policies, and other documents, Andrew Frycowski explained.
SentiOne invites everyone to test the bot
To test the bot, SentiOne invited journalism students who spent a week examining the bot and identifying missing subjects and inaccurate answers.
We invite the public to test the bot – we ask everyone to challenge our tool and send us missing or wrong answers. SentiOne will analyse bot’s conversations, identify missing topic areas and keep on expanding chatbot’s knowledge and areas of expertise – said Agnes Uba. She added: Conversational AI can only be as good as the people behind it. No one knows more about Brexit than the British public, who has debated the subject for more than seven years. This is why we encourage everyone to participate in developing our tool.
