April was our second month (out of three and a half) on the CivTech Accelerator. Here are some things we achieved: Vulnerability identification workshops

SIDE recently won a Scottish Government CivTech competition. The challenge, set by Citizen Advice Scotland’s Extra Help Unit, is to ‘identify and prioritise support for people in the most vulnerable situations, starting with those having energy problems.’ Our winning proposal is HelpFirst, a machine-learning tool that empowers care organisations to…

We’ve spent the last 9 months building Cassie, a chatbot for Citizens Advice Scotland. You can try it on CAS’s Money Talk Team site. We recently analysed a selection of 500 conversations that took place in early 2023.

For the last 7 months, we’ve been building Cassie, a chatbot for Citizens Advice Scotland. We thought we were doing pretty well… and then ChatGPT launched. How does Cassie compare? Can we make use of the advances that are demonstrated by ChatGPT and similar models? A handful of experiments Fuelled by ChatGPT excitement, we…

Over the last six weeks, we’ve made lots of improvements to the Citizens Advice Scotland chatbot. Many of those improvements are behind the scenes, so we wanted to share them here. To be honest, it feels like we have only just got to the start line. The initial four months…

Since the pandemic, many CABs have switched from mainly giving face-to-face advice to mainly giving remote advice. When giving advice remotely, getting documents signed (especially 3rd party mandates) is a persistent pain. Some CABs use Signable or similar software. Could this be rolled out across the network? We are exploring…

We are prototyping a chatbot as part of the next phase of the CivTech project for CAS (following on from this prioritisation plan). Some CABs have seen huge demand for webchat. In success, we believe a chatbot can automate the routine parts of a webchat, freeing up advisors to focus…

In the last update, we asked for help prioritising areas where technology could improve service delivery across Scottish CABs. Since then, we’ve conducted workshops with over two dozen people from across the network. (Thanks to everyone who gave their time.) We’ve distilled these discussions down to 5 top priority areas…

There’s a long list of ways technology could help at CABs across the CAS network. Thanks to a successful application for CivTech match funding, we’ve got 12 months to explore service improvements and deliver them for the CAB network. Where do we start? Managers, we need your help and that…