Florence launches FestinaLente, its first AI-powered chatbot

Florence has launched “FestinaLente,” a brand new AI-powered chatbot designed to help residents and newcomers with one of many metropolis’s most requested companies: altering their official residence. The mission, launched on Thursday, September 11, makes Florence one of many first municipalities in Italy to experiment with generative synthetic intelligence in public administration.

The chatbot can reply in pure language not solely in Italian but in addition in 13 different languages, together with English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Finnish, Greek, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese. It gives clear and rapid steering on residence procedures, together with necessities, paperwork, timelines and methods to submit functions.

Each 12 months, Florence’s demographic companies deal with greater than 24,000 residence requests and obtain an identical variety of inquiries. The new assistant is meant to ease this workload by offering round the clock first-level help immediately from the municipality’s web site. The instrument doesn’t substitute present companies, nevertheless it expands accessibility and reduces the necessity to seek for cellphone numbers, ship emails or wait in line.

To guarantee accuracy, “FestinaLente” was educated with official documentation and procedures underneath the supervision of the municipal workers answerable for residence companies. No private knowledge is required to make use of the chatbot, and if customers mistakenly enter delicate info, the dialog is mechanically deleted inside the similar day.

From a technical perspective, FestinaLente is powered by AISURU, a SaaS platform designed for creating and managing conversational brokers based mostly on generative AI. Unlike a single giant language mannequin, AISURU acts as an orchestration layer that enables the municipality to combine and take a look at totally different LLMs — together with these developed by OpenAI, Mistral, and Anthropic — and select the very best performer.

After comparative trials, Florence chosen ChatGPT as the principle engine for its sturdy potential to grasp pure language and generate clear, correct responses. This modular structure diminished improvement time and ensured the chatbot could possibly be educated immediately on official procedures with the assistance of municipal workers.

The system operates with out requiring private knowledge, mechanically deletes any delicate info entered by mistake on the identical day, and shops solely non-personal interplay logs for as much as six months to observe efficiency. For now, FestinaLente is lively solely within the part devoted to residence change requests, some of the regularly used companies of the municipality.

The identify FestinaLente comes from the Latin phrase “make haste slowly,” a motto used since historical Rome to recommend that effectivity and velocity ought to at all times be balanced with care and accuracy. The expression was adopted by emperors resembling Augustus as a precept of clever governance, and over the centuries it has been represented with symbols just like the dolphin and the anchor. By selecting this identify, Florence hyperlinks its digital innovation to a practice of considerate progress.

The mission was developed by Firenze Smart with the help of the expertise associate Ergon, as a part of a broader digital companies program financed by means of the European “PN Metro Plus 2021–2027” fund.

According to the town, “FestinaLente” represents an essential step in making Florence extra digital, inclusive and environment friendly. The chatbot is now out there immediately from the homepage of the Municipality of Florence.

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