Derby City Council is claiming £200,000 of annual savings following the introduction of the “AI-Digital Talkers” (Darcie and Ali). This saving results from reduced Agency worker capacity equivalent to 4 full time people, and reduced contractor workload of £100,000 – notionally a total of 8 people. But with what consequences?

In a presentation to the Council’s Executive Scrutiny Board on 18th December 2023, Andy Brammall (Director Digital & Physical Infrastructure & Customer Engagement) presented a number of statistics about the successes of the “Digital Talkers” Darcie/Ali. Specifically, on phone calls ( the facility is also available as a website bot), which he referred to as the “bigger prize”, he announced that Darcie/Ali had achieved a 42% “deflection rate”

“…this is where the AI (Artificial Intelligence) has been able to fully fulfil the enquiry from the citizen or divert them to another channel such as the fully digital channel which doubles the original target”.

Andy Brammall Exec Scrutiny Board 18th December 2023

“Deflection” means that the caller is, at best, referred to an existing page on the Derby City Council website – at worst, the caller has hung up, none the wiser. There is nothing, conclusive, that distinguishes between the two,and consequently the claim that the caller’s query has been “fully fulfilled” is questionable.

Derby News has investigated the performance of Darcie/Ali and has identified a number of cases of misleading/incorrect and unhelpful advice – some of which could be a safeguarding concern.

What is Darcie / Ali ?

Callers to the main Derby City Council switchboard are answered by “Darcie”; for Derby Homes it is “Ali”- they are essentially the same bot. The same facility is available on the 2 websites with the answers being very similar to those given on the phone.

Darcie/Ali request that you ask a question in very simple terms, for example, “How do I pay my Council Tax“. In this case it will return a short statement ( preprepared by a Council officer); in some cases, a link is provided to the relevant page on the Council’s website if a text message is requested.

The technology in use is principally voice recognition and the abiliy to associate it with the “correct” answer. There is no evidence of machine learning or understanding.

Darcie/Ali asks if the answer was helpful. If not, then the opportunity exists to ask a follow up question, albeit must be simple. If it cannot find a suitable answer then it will offer the option to be connected to a real person.

If the initial question is slightly more complex then it is a different matter. Taking the example of someone who is having difficulty paying Council Tax but is above the Council Tax Support threshold.

” I have a problem paying my Council Tax”

The answer refers the caller to the options for CT support, discounts and exemptions which is ok at stage 1. A follow up question asking “ Can I pay Council Tax over a longer period of time” returns the link to the website “how to pay Council Tax”. If the caller then says that this is not helpful then Darcie/Ali starts talking about Housing Benefits!

To get a decent answer then the caller must ask “How do I set up a payment plan” – this returns a link to the webpage “Problems paying your Council Tax”. This implies that the caller needs to have a good idea of the answer before calling.

Interestingly if this initial question is typed into the Council’s existing search engine ( not AI) then it directs the user to the correct page – much quicker than Darcie/Ali!

Another question which was slightly more complex and a very real issue ” How do I claim Housing Benefits when I’m in temporary accommodation” just could not be answered. It ignored the reference to temporary accommodation. This had to be referred to a human adviser

Statistics

Brammall’s 18th December presentation included statistics which raised more questions than it answered

A total of 500k questions were asked in the 6 months since Go-live; split 242k to Derby City Council and 208k to Derby Homes – roughly equal despite the populations served being vastly different.

Derby has around 112,000 houses which implies around 2 questions per household in the last 6 months. Derby Homes has 12,400 houses which would suggest that each tenant asked 17 questions rather than using the existing on-line services. The service scope of Derby City Council is much greater than that of Derby Homes which is largely confined to Landlord/Tenant issues with the exception of homelessness which it covers City wide.

In the same period the use of the Darcie/Ali Website bots were just 32k – 94% less than the phone enquries. As the bot is accessed through the website then the population of people relates solely to those who are already comfortable with web searching. Notably, the skew in the split of the questions asked between Darcie and Ali is much more consistent with the population numbers

Darcie : 0.25 questions per household

Ali : 0.3 questions per household

The other interesting skew is that around 33% of all users of Darcie/Ali on the website were Out of Hours; this is to be expected as people will access the internet at all hours – there is no expectation that someone will be available to speak.

Conversely, with the phone statistics, just 2.4% rang out of hours; a reasonable assumption would be that they rang with an expectation of speaking to a person, not a bot.

Bramall refers to the “conversations” as “complex” without explaining what that constitutes ( the system does not “remember” an earlier part of the conversation); any user will know that there is no scope for a “conversation” as such. A follow-up question often results in the invite to be transferred to a real person. Perhaps the number of “conversations” reflects the number of people who have successfully made it through to a real person.

A 2022 study by Leeds City Council, which receives 1.4 million calls from its population of 793k people, revealed that 47% of people had checked the website before contacting the Council. This would suggest that they would not expect a response which is a simple referral back to the website. It also showed that around 40% of the calls related to Housing, rents, repairs which correlates with the Derby Homes statistics.

Darcie can be dangerously unhelpful.

Apart from the more routine issues that the Council covers, it is also responsible for Children’s services.

In response to the question “I want to report an abused child” it replied with a very flawed response.

Apart from the obvious advice of ringing the Police, the reference to 01332 888777 is the Derby Homes main number answered by Ali; there is no Option 4!

Derby Homes is not responsible for dealing with abused children.

The link at the bottom is Safeguarding Vulnerable Adults, not children.

If the caller persists with Darcie and declares that the answer was not helpful then the bot proceeds to explain how the Repairs team logs reports!

The conversation, at no point, directs the caller to useful contact numbers on child abuse.

Comment

Brammall’s presentation was on the Cabinet paper “Transforming the Council using AI Technology” (20/12/23). In the preamble of that report it states:

“In May 2023, Derby City Council and Derby Homes launched Darcie and Ali on the contact centre telephony solution, becoming the first council in the UK to replace its main switchboard with a phone-based AI assistant proficient in council services.”

It is a moot point as to whether Darcie/Ali exhibit any form of intelligence, or learning and whether it is truly AI. In a range of questions asked of Darcie/Ali the conclusion was that it was no more intelligent than the Council’s existing search engine. In fact the search engine was more accurate in the test questions

A previous article identified that people at risk of homelessness need a “hack”, suggested by Ali, to get to speak to a real person

Derby City Council’s digital helper “Ally” complicates life for homeless callers.

Darcie/Ali is nothing more than a voice activated search engine and would only be helpful to a very narrow demographic. It does not help those who are uncomfortable using websites or those with anything more than a basic question.

It is unlikley that many people ring the Council, or Derby Homes, to ask basic questions, and those that do probably want to speak to someone, rather than a digital assistant. It is most likely that the majority of people who make contact by phone have a complex question that can only be solved by a real human adviser. Some will persist with Darcie/Ali’s questions knowing that they will get transferred eventually, some will give up and be part of the “deflected” statistic. It is reasonable to assume that those who are “deflected” could have left with unanswered questions possibly meaning that they could get further into debt, don’t get the services that they need or, in the worst case, an abused child goes unreported.

There is a real risk that people with language/speaking, learning or mental health difficulties could be significantly disavantaged because of this interface. There is no option but to navigate around Darcie/Ali before a real person can be spoken to.

This is a disingenuous ( and probably unrealised) cost saving which only benefits a few Senior Officers who can boast on their CV that they were involved in  

“…the first council in the UK to replace its main switchboard with a phone-based AI assistant proficient in council services”

This system has clearly not been fully tested, contains some real errors, and poor advice. It would be better just to tell all callers to search the website first before being transferred, as that is all this “AI” project is doing…apart from generating unmonitored, unintended, and potentially very negative, consequences!