The UK government has confirmed that ‘GOV.UK Chat,’ its experimental chatbot service for small businesses, will undergo wider trials later this year. Built using OpenAI’s GPT-4o platform, the model allows business owners to use simple prompts to find out more information on relevant rules, tax and support schemes. Responses will be “straightforward” and “personalised,” said the government, collating information otherwise spread across several dozen official pages.
“Outdated and bulky government processes waste people’s time too often, with the average adult in the UK spending the equivalent of a working week and a half dealing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,” said the DSIT Secretary, Peter Kyle. “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 going with GOV.UK Chat.”
Trial and error with GOV.UK Chat
GOV.UK Chat began trials last year. Up to 70% of its users agreed that answers solicited from the platform were helpful – though, as the government conceded in its announcement, there was still clearly room for improvement when it came to the accuracy of the bot’s responses. “Because of the way generative AI technology works, the government cannot predict and fully control every response,” it added. “However, the technology allows the tool to provide tailored responses to individual questions and specific challenges users might have.”
DSIT added that relevant “guardrails” have also been added to GOV.UK Chat, including criteria for questions the platform should not answer, measures that prevent the sharing of personal or financial data from other users and steps to “prevent the chatbot responding to queries that may prompt an illegal answer,” a probable allusion to future attempts at ‘jailbreaking’ the model. UX experience and accessibility improvements have also been made, too, and an onboarding process added.
Government AI experiments
DSIT were keen to point out that the phased rollout of GOV.UK Chat comes as it attempts to fulfil Labour’s manifesto pledge to create a new ‘digital centre’ of government – though readers will note that initial trials for the platform preceded the election of the Starmer administration by several months.
GOV.UK Chat is not the first experiment with a public-sector chatbot service. Last month, Jersey’s Financial Services Commission announced its trial of an AI bot to answer regulatory queries. In 2023, meanwhile, Portugal’s Ministry of Justice launched a model tasked with answering simple legal questions – though the platform floundered when a BBC News reporter attempted to ask the platform whether it was possible to create a company if its would-be owner was under the age of 18 but married.
The UK government conceded that GOV.UK Chat may still continue to provide erroneous results on occasion. However, it maintained that its next trial phase would allow it to gain new insights into the model’s inner workings and “inform any decision to roll out the chatbot more widely across GOV.UK.”
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