A Determination of the Level of Adoption of eGovernment-based Conversational Systems in Nigeria

Towards reaping the benefits provided by conversational systems, conversational systems in form of chatbots have been deployed to provide different kinds of services in different countries of the world. However, government-based services to the citizens are limited. Consequently, there is a need to know the level of the adoption of this technology in Nigeria so as for the stakeholders to be guided as per the line of action to be taken in reaping the benefit of the technology being usable to bridge the digital divide prevalent in the country. This work therefore investigated the level of adoption of conversational systems - both text-based and voice-based by the various governments in Nigeria. In carrying out the investigations, the websites of the various state governments were visited and searched, for text-based and voice-based conversational systems as well as the availability of any chatting facilities. The results obtained show that even though the vast majority of the state governments have web presence, conversational systems are generally not available. Only three states have chatting facilities; two are text-based and one has a chatting interface that is really not a conversational system. None has voice-based conversational system and two states from the North Central zone have no web presence at all. Consequently, governments need to adopt the usage of conversational systems in order to make services more available in different modes for the benefits of the mases and to reach the unreached. The North central states specifically also need to fully have web presence like the others in the remaining geo-political zones.