__Seeing the worldwide political developments, we thought it would be good to create Duco. Duco is a chatbot that lives on Facebook Messenger, guiding you through all the content of the NPO.
Since the NPO has an overload of quality content produced every day, the editorial side of Duco was not to be underestimated. Duco was to become your guide though the vast sea of political items, both audio and tv.
With Duco, we targeted millennials. This group lives and breathes Facebook, and more importantly, uses Facebook as their primary source of news. Duco helps you by showing the latest polls, tells you who’s front running each party, shares the latest ins and outs of the participating politicians, and more. Finally, Duco also helps you navigate to the nearest polling station.
In an attempt to make Duco smarter, we hooked up an AI to help Duco understand more. However, even with some tweaking the Dutch language is still hard to fully understand. But hey: first steps were made.
To make sure the bot understands as much as possible we used fuzzy matching. Simply put: if “stemlokaal” is a command, now Duco also understands “stmlkaal”, for instance. Chatbots are easily perceived as too dumb and quickly become frustrating to the user. Fuzzy matching is a small step to tackle that frustration.
Most chatbots, like those of Jinek, NOS and Quartz, are nice, but they stick to the paradigm of a conversation. If you explore the potential of chatbots you can take the functionality a step further. We added three exciting features new to chatbots.
1 – Guide Guide With the listing of all daily content on the TV and Radio we created the option to set alarms for the shows you want to see. 15 minutes before the show starts, Duco “alarms” you by sending you a message. In other words, we use the chatbot platform for push notifications of sorts.
2 – Daily Polls By hooking up an AI, we automated the content of the daily polls, to make sure these were always up to date.
3 – Voting Booths We programmed Duco to use a list of all the voting booths in the Netherlands. If you would ask “voting booth” Duco would ask for your location – automated of course – and based on that location Duco would give you the nearest three locations to vote. If you then click the location closest or most convenient, Duco would open Google Maps for you with the quickest route to the voting booth.