The first digital assistant that operates with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology and will serve citizens who visit the gov.gr portal was presented today, during a meeting at Megaros Maximos under Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, by the leadership of the Ministry of Digital Governance.

The digital assistant, which takes the form of a chatbot and is being activated in its test form this afternoon, will help its visitors gov.gr to easily find the service they are looking for, answering their simple as well as complex questions. It is the first application that utilizes artificial intelligence in the Government and one of the first similar services in Europe, contributing to the wider modernization of the government mechanism, especially in the part of interaction with citizens to facilitate them and simplify their daily lives.

In his art the new assistant will draw information from the list of 1,608 digitized services that have been added to gov.gr to date and 3,270 digitized administrative procedures that have been integrated into the MITOS registry, in order to direct each interlocutor, while giving information on the actions that the citizen needs to take for the rapid processing of his request.

“The possibilities of artificial intelligence are now very impressive and I believe that with what we are doing today we are significantly upgrading the possibilities of gov.gr, essentially bringing it up to date, possibly even ahead of its time, in terms of the ease with which we can to chat now with text that we would also use in a spoken conversation and enabling the algorithm to give us answers that are ultimately easier to understand“, the Prime Minister emphasized during the presentation of the possibilities of the new service by Minister of Digital Governance Dimitris Papastergiou.

“I think it is very important what you said Minister, that this is a machine that learns according to how many more searches are done, so we will ask for the understanding of the users if possibly the results of the questions asked in mAIgov are not exactly correct. As the machine is trained and includes more data, the more accurate the answers will become. And I think it’s an application that allows us to really understand the enormous potential but also the challenges of artificial intelligence. The fact that we use it in a brand as strong as gov.gr shows precisely that we always want to anticipate developments and modernize a tool that has now become an integral element of our daily lifeKyriakos Mitsotakis noted.

The mAIgov initiative uses artificial intelligence tools that will allow the assistant to learn through exchanges that it will have daily with citizens, resulting in the chatbot constantly improving over time. In the test phase, it will be possible to serve approximately 240 questions in Greek per minute, a number that will increase in the next period.

All message exchanges with the digital assistant are anonymous, that is, the application has no information about the citizen it serves, ensuring the protection of users’ personal data. The digital assistant is already trained not to ask for or accept personal information such as passwords or payment information.

“We will wait and you will wait – I imagine – for the citizens’ feedback and I believe that very soon we will remove the “beta” indicator from there and the service will become fully functional. And I believe that the more the citizen becomes familiar with the service, the more its use will increase at the expense of the classic ways in which we come into contact with gov.gr. I would like to thank all those who supported this application and hope to see it embraced by the citizens, with the same fervor that they embraced the original gov.gr”, said the Prime Minister.

The digital assistant will also contribute to the greater familiarity of the average citizen with gov.gr and the electronic provision of services by the statewhich is part of the wider digital transition in the 21st century economy.

The Minister of Digital Governance Dimitris Papastergiou stated: “We are very happy to present today the first Artificial Intelligence application for the Greek Government. gov.gr has greatly facilitated the daily life of citizens and has contributed to strengthening their trust in the state.

With mAIgov, we come to strengthen this relationship, proving that digital technologies empower the state and can make it even friendlier, modern and efficient. The digital assistant will essentially serve the citizens, helping them find what they need among the digital services provided, as well as MITOS Public procedures».

The Deputy Minister of Digital Governance Konstantinos Kyranakis said: “The focus of the new AI test model we are launching is citizen service. From the beginning of the invention of all these language models, their utilization was done at the assistance level, so that they help, at every level, the people who use them.

This is exactly our goal, to serve the citizen 24 hours a day for all matters. Our purpose is, therefore, to bring the AI ​​chatbot into the context of gov.gr. And like any similar model, the more citizens test it and “train” it with their questions, the better and more effective it will become».

The meeting was also attended by the Deputy Minister to the Prime Minister and Director of the Prime Minister’s Office Yannis Bratakos, the General Secretary of Information Systems and Digital Governance Demosthenes Anagnostopoulos and the Director of the Minister of Digital Governance Spyros Diamantis.