The government will ramp up trials of its experimental generative AI chatbot, GOV.UK Chat, after positive feedback on the tool.
Until now, the chatbot has been piloted offline, but it will now be launched on 30 GOV.UK business pages.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said this means up to 15,000 people will now be able to ask the tool for advice on business rules and support on pages such as “set up a business” and “search for a trade mark”.
In early trials of the experimental chatbot – which is powered by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT – 70% of users said the responses were useful and just under 65% of our users were satisfied with the experience. However, the trials also found that more testing and development was required to meet the high accuracy standards required for advice and information on GOV.UK.
A team of in-house data scientists, developers and designers are building the tool, which uses OpenAI’s GPT-4o technology.
DSIT, which has taken on the government's key digital functions, said the aim of the chatbot is to “help people more quickly navigate complex advice to understand what matters to them” by providing “straightforward, personalised answers that collate information that may otherwise be spread across dozens of pages”.
It said the results from the trial will provide insights to make further improvements to the tool and determine the next steps, which could include larger-scale testing and could ultimately lead to the chatbot being rolled out across GOV.UK’s 700,000 pages.
DSIT said “stringent” safety measures and “guardrails” have been put in place to detect which questions the chatbot should, and should not, answer.
These include measures to prevent the chatbot responding to queries that may prompt an illegal answer, share sensitive financial information or force the chatbot to take a political position. Experts on AI safety and safeguarding techniques at the AI Safety Institute have also been consulted on this work.
Science, innovation and technology secretary Peter Kyle said the chatbot is an example of the government’s commitment to experiment with new technologies to improve government services.
“Outdated and bulky government processes waste people’s time too often, with the average adult in the UK spending the equivalent of a working week and a half dealing with public sector bureaucracy every year,” he said.
“We are going to change this by experimenting with emerging technology to find new ways to save people time and make their lives easier, as we are doing with GOV.UK Chat. With all new technology, it takes time to get it right so we’re taking it through extensive trials with thousands of real users before it is used more widely.
“This is an essential part of our ambition to use AI to improve public services in a safe and reliable way, making sure the UK government leads by example in driving innovation forward.”