PassBot: A chatbot for providing information on Getting a Greek Passport

Abstract

An important goal of eGovernment initiatives worldwide is to provide citizens with accurate, personalized and accessible information on Public Services (PS). Chatbots is a promising technology that can be used for that purpose. The aim of this paper is to develop and evaluate a chatbot (namely PassBot) for providing personalized information on the PS “Get a Greek Passport”. For this purpose, the PS was analyzed and different chatbot platforms were evaluated. Based on that, PassBot was developed to enable users to easily and reliably obtain personalized information on getting a Greek passport. The description of the public service was developed according to the European Core Public Service Vocabulary Application Profile (CPSV-AP), which is an extensible and machine-readable data model aiming to harmonise PS descriptions across the EU member states. As CPSV-AP does not inherently support complex PS, it was extended to accommodate personalized PS information provision. The chatbot was used and evaluated with promising results.