Shelter is a registered charity that campaigns to end homelessness and bad housing in England and Scotland.It gives advice, information and advocacy to people in need, and tackles the root causes of bad housing by lobbying government and local authorities for new laws and policies to improve the lives of homeless and badly housed people. Get advice. What about local dialects? We developed the app using a nodeJS back end which plugs into Microsoft’s Azure bot framework and LUIS as the natural language processing model. The language model does a pretty good job of routing questions to answers and it deals well with misspellings and truncated questions. While they weren’t against using a chatbot, they couldn’t help but think that important information is being left out. The concept behind Sheldon, Ailsa’s predecessor, was to create a bot that would theoretically be able to answer people’s queries about private tenants’ rights in Scotland. Shelter Scotland is the leading charity providing advice and advocacy to people living in private rented property across the country. Shelter Scotland’s new chatbot Ailsa has had 4,000 interactions in its first four months significantly reducing the volume of enquires to the charity’s helpline. Shelter Scotland free housing advice helpline 0808 800 4444 (Mon-Fri 9-5). Ailsa started her life as what’s commonly known in the industry as a frequently asked questions (FAQ) chatbot. It’s important to consider your audience before you start planning your bot project. Bartholomew said of the project: “The chatbot allows people to self-serve and find out the information online, rather than phone our helpline. We will never tolerate aggressive or personal criticism of the blogger, any form of copyright abuse or posts that are obscene, defamatory, profane, sexually explicit, racially offensive or objectionable. Our COVID Q&A with Watson is an AI-powered chatbot that addresses consumers' questions and concerns about COVID-19. This article is not about numbers, stats, and figures surrounding the chatbot industry (although I will use some to support my point here and there).. GuitarGuitar . Shelter Scotland, an organization aimed at giving people in difficult situations proper housing, has relied on Ailsa chatbot. Hi! Since its launch last October, the chatbot has been used 4,380 times, which has significantly reduced the strain on the charity’s helplines. You no doubt have overlooked some obvious mistakes around how your creation performs in the hands of real users. 999 were tasked with helping Shelter Scotland communicate changes to housing legislation affecting landlords and tenants.. As part of the New House Rules campaign, New Now developed a chatbot using the Microsoft Bot Framework, able to answer tenants’ and landlords’ queries about the new Private Residential Tenancy. All things considered, an FAQ bot is pretty limited in what it can answer. In our case, an entity could be a question related to notice periods or deposits. It doesn’t allow the user to veer off script, and it also doesn’t take any free text questions. Multi-site refresh. There are other models out there, such as IBM Watson which is available for use and closer to home Siri and Alexa which isn’t open for public use. By chatting to me you can get instant advice 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Shelter Scotland also has a Covid-19 housing advice page, that will be updated as and when any initiatives are announced by SG or Westminster. The new PRT improves security for tenants and provide safeguards for landlords, lenders and investors. What was striking for me was that many people are confident using a bot. Social Housing. Northern Marine Group . We knew that the activity that we planned to raise awareness could potentially cause lots of people to have questions about the new tenancy. The Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016 came into force on 1 December 2017, introducing a new 'private residential tenancy'. The private residential tenancy gives tenants and landlords more rights and … The lab would benefit from the expertise of Shelter’s internal experts from a variety of teams including: Children’s Legal Services, digital, UX and tech teams, and the Shelter Scotland … © Shelter Scotland 2017 Sycamore Lane Elementary School is a shelter, and is usually the second shelter to be opened. Shelter Scotland . For Shelter Scotland, the chatbot was initially developed to work from a set decision tree of questions. Advisers are available to respond to more urgent queries.”. NEW HOUSE RULES. Checks if we have a live chat operator available if so provide the link to chat, If a live chat person isn’t available, she’ll check if our helpline is open and provide the number if it is. The first incarnation of Shelter’s bot scheme was initially conceived at a hackathon. The last session that I attended at the Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference last week was entitled ‘Chatbots are so hot’. Project: Campaign Identity and Chatbot Client: Shelter Scotland Design: 999 Design. However, the charity has since decided it is keen to develop the bot further. Ailwyn worked as the primary developer in the Shelter Scotland head office, coordinating front-end development. Not Serious.] The transcripts also show us when demand for the service is, and so far, we’ve had a few chats outside of our opening hours, which if done right can provide an essential life line to people when there isn’t a real person available. Shelter Scotland is a charity that works to alleviate the distress caused by homelessness and bad housing in Scotland. NEWS: Chatbots.org survey on 3000 US and UK consumers shows it is time for chatbot integration in customer service!read more.. Responsibilities included: Created highly accessible front-end code to serve hundreds of thousands of users, reducing existing page load times by over 75% The private residential tenancy gives tenants and landlords more rights and responsibilities and more security in their own home. If no live help is available, she’ll direct users to our Advice pages. However, sometimes we will delete a comment, or hold it in a moderation queue which will delay it being published. 27 March 2018, I'm here to make complicated things easy. Charity number 263710 (England & Wales), SC002327 (Scotland) Keith Bartholomew, Senior Digital Officer at Shelter Scotland said that Ailsa was currently in stage two of development, which will introduce natural language programming and allow for a greater number of queries. The charity correctly predicted that these new rules would result in confusion for both landlords and tenants: the bot was rolled out to deal with the influx of enquiries. It's built on the IBM Watson Ads … Our world is changing. 2 reviews of Shelter Scotland "I'm going to be honest with you - I don't know much about Shelter Scotland beyond the fact that they have a badass bookshop in my neighbourhood and the recent #SocialMediaSanta campaign made my heart sing. Ailsa, another housing advice chatbot at Shelter Scotland, tells people who she (it?) It offers important answers to people that need housing and helps them apply for a housing program. 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Given the success of the first phase (as reported in Econsultancy), the client wanted to take the project further by. Context Edit. Campaign Identity, Landing Page & Chatbot. You can use “off the shelf” products like ChatFuel to power the questions and answers, or Microsoft provide a bot framework to build a bot that can integrate with your website or with Facebook messenger. We worked with them to develop a creative concept and design approach - plus a digital solution in the form of a friendly chatbot - to handle a huge upsurge in questions following a change in legislation. With this in mind, Ailsa tries to answer the question but if she doesn’t know the answer she does one of three things: It’s easy to build your bot and squirrel away showcasing your creation to the world for a “ta-da moment”, but from experience that hardly ever works out as planned. This response can come from a human, or a chatbot, or a combination of both. Shelter Scotland was commissioned by the Scottish Government at the end of 2017 to raise awareness of Scotland’s new private residential tenancy to landlords and tenants. In the first phase of this project, 999 worked with New Now to deliver a chatbot, using a guided conversation style, that was able to answer tenants’ and landlords’ queries about the new Private Residential Tenancy. In 2017, Scottish Shelter (the national campaign for the homeless) responded to a Scottish government initiative to use technology. This article is not about us, how amazing we are, and the cool stuff we have built. Email Design & Communications Strategy. For real-time communication using text What it does This is a type of online chat where users type their query into a ‘chatbox’ and get a response in real time. If you compare that to our live chat, we had around 4000 people use our live chat service over the last year. Shelter Scotland Scotiabank House 6 South Charlotte Street Edinburgh EH2 4AW. Shelter invited us to conduct a five-day UX Lab at their offices in Old Street to research, design and test ideas for the new product. Developed on Shelter’s standalone website, this new bot is rooted in problem-solving rather than fundraising or general awareness. The above are both being run by staff who are now WFH. Scotland County has 4 designated shelter locations. After Sheldon, the charity went on to create ‘Ask Ailsa’. Social Housing. We programmed Ailsa to answer the simple questions about the new tenancy, things like: In the 3 months that we ran the campaign, there were over 6500 interactions with Ailsa to find answers. Co-production in action: How our group in Dundee successfully pushed for change in their city. You map out all the questions that you think your user will ask, write responses and then organise those responses like a flow chart. Financial Times . Another preferred long-form content which covers the topic in its entirety. Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation, and other new technologies are already having an impact upon our organisations, our jobs, and our lives. Shelter Scotland was commissioned by the Scottish Government at the end of 2017 to raise awareness of Scotland’s new private residential tenancy to landlords and tenants. I don’t think that a chatbot can replace a real person, especially when providing essential advice but it can certainly help answer some of the basic questions your users might have, freeing up time for your advisers to answer more urgent queries. During our own testing, we squashed some obvious bugs to do with the flow of questions and the placement of buttons, but one thing that surprised me was that some users just wouldn’t engage with a bot. In the case of the Shelter Scotland, and these chatbots, the question to explore is what body of knowledge are they based upon? They are Scotland High School, which has a history of being opened most frequently in the past 25 years. Previous | Next. As Keith Bartholomew, Senior Digital Officer at Shelter Scotland said: "The chatbot allows people to self-serve and find out the information online, rather than phone our helpline. It covered presentations on ATJ Bot on Tennessee’s Help4TN website, coloured blue and also Chicago’s Rentervention bot, coloured red as above and previously covered in an earlier post. Clarion Group . The model does its magic and maps what it thinks the user’s intent was, to an entity in your model. how much notice a tenant had to provide and how a landlord could terminate a tenancy. This guide explains how to go about getting housing from the council or a registered social landlord (a housing association or housing cooperative) How do I get a social rented tenancy? Naming & Brand Creation. charity: water. I debated whether or not to include charity: water’s chatbot into this list, as it’s among … Our free national helpline is available 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday and advice seekers also have the option to speak to someone using live chat – but both of these channels are already under pressure and we receive more calls that we can answer. ... and the Shelter Scotland digital team. 6 South Charlotte Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4AW Shelter helps people struggling with bad housing or homelessness through support, advice and legal services. The speed and ease with which the bot could be created was undoubtedly a big motivator, as well as the straightforward nature of user queries in the first place. 94 likes. Each question typed by a user gets mapped to an answer in the LUIS. I'm Ally. Authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority, Scotland’s new private residential tenancy, Shelter Scotland’s 3-point plan gets the go-ahead. To engage Scottish tenants and landlords with new legislation coming into effect in 2017, Shelter Scotland received a government grant to generate awareness around the reforms. A chatbot to tackle housing problems. What are the changes that are being introduced? Granted these were more in-depth queries, but still, the bot did a pretty good job of keeping our lines free for more in-depth and emergency queries. Shelter Scotland. During the three months of the initial campaign, there were over 6,500 interactions compared to 4,000 users of Shelter Scotland’s Live Chat service over the last year. The high rent for some houses forces people to look for housing in less desirable areas, which can be both inconvenient and dangerous. Spurred on by the success of Ask Ailsa, Shelter Scotland is running a hackathon in Edinburgh at the end of March to develop additional solutions to the current private renting situation in Scotland. How to bring a new tenancy to an end and so on. Get our insight into the latest policy reports and stats, stories of how we've helped or simply find some great housing advice. Those that haven’t been successful were redirected to contact us for help via live chat, the phone or our website. It was implemented as a result of the new rules introduced around length and tenancy in regards to private tenancy e.g. Talk to me: What is Chatbot Adoption Really About This article is not about features or benefits of a chatbot. 09.00am. It’s worth considering, but do think about your audience, the supported content available to refer users to, and provide a way for them to reach a real person should they want to. [Beta. Last year we received a whopping 227 gifts – lets see if we can smash that total in 2014! Increased civic engagement Get switched on to Scotland’s . There’s something in the Shelter Scotland blog for everyone, so read on - and be sure to leave your comments! This started life, explains Chatbots Magazine, as ‘Sheldon’ .. a conversational bot that sits in messenger platforms acting as an intermediary between the user and Shelter Staff. Charity number 263710 (England & Wales), SC002327 (Scotland) 6 South Charlotte Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4AW Authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority It has helped a significant number of people get to grips with the legislation changes, without us getting a large volume of calls to our helpline. We’ve launched version 2 in mid-June, so it’s early days, but so far, we’ve had a mix of conversations, some successful and others too complex for Ailsa to deal with. is at the start of the chat but this is an act of self-preservation more than anything. Ally Housing Chatbot. Shelter Scotland Mar 2017 to Jun 2019Edinburgh, United Kingdom. “We anticipated the fact that users would get frustrated. Another chatbot, Sheldon, from Shelter Scotland, aims to tackle homelessness and solve housing problems faced by the general population. They’re right of course, a bot can only provide bite-sized content, so link out to deeper information if you have it. The first incarnation of Shelter’s bot scheme was initially conceived at a hackathon. Users wanted to ask their own questions in their own way which posed its own set of potential pitfalls. How does that knowledge accurately reflect all of the ecosystem of the organizations who provide services relevant to that need? It is often seen as simple and accessible as users do not need … Continue reading “Webchat” You can post photos on social media, using the hashtag #SocialMediaSanta, and tagging the Shelter Scotland account (@ShelterScotland on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram). Shelter Scotland values comments on this blog either complimentary or critical. Back in December, the lovely Rachel R turned me onto … But heart singing moments are still worthy of comment, so i'll write this review based on that. A conversation, if you want one. Shelter, the National Campaign for Homeless People Limited Charity number 263710 (England & Wales), SC002327 (Scotland) Company number 1038133 6 South Charlotte Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4AW Do you think a chatbot can help your organisation deliver a better service? People found the chatbot useful, but we wanted to see if people would respond better to a bot that processed natural language. Shelter Scotland has an advice line for advisers called ScotWRAS. It got us thinking, could a chatbot help us alleviate the pressure on our helpline during this activity and in the future? From our chatbot Ailsa’s interactions, only 5.5% of the audience asked for contact details of the Shelter Scotland helpline which means that of those who contact Shelter Scotland by initiating the chatbot, there was a 94.5% reduction in calls to the helpdesk, reducing pressure on the helpline to deal with more In the case of one user, they disliked the rise of robots in our world. Ailsa is designed to work from a set decision tree of questions, but the charity is keen to develop the bot further. Does someone in Glasgow ask a question the same way as someone in Aberdeen? Shelter Scotland, a homeless and housing charity recently partnered with hackathon organisers Product Forge, to bring the Scottish tech scene together to collaborate on solving issues around homelessness, the private rental sector and getting on the property ladder. 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