Aurora, Finland's AI Assistant, is the country's answer to Siri and Alexa.

Aurora, Finland's AI Assistant, is the country's answer to Siri and Alexa.

Finland's Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment presented its first report, "Finland's Age of Artificial Intelligence — Turning Finland into a Leading Country in the Application of Artificial Intelligence," in December 2017, describing the country's artificial intelligence strategy. The paper, which was written by a steering committee of renowned Finn economists and technologists, paints a bold picture of the country's future in terms of artificial intelligence development and application: “Artificial intelligence will be an active part of every Finn's daily life in another five years.”
For the public sector, an AI helper

In comparison to other European countries' AI strategy reports, Finland's age of artificial intelligence focuses a high emphasis on AI applications in the public sector. “We will construct the world's top public services,” says a full chapter in the report. This is consistent with the country's reputation for providing world-class public services in sectors such as health care, education, and other fields. Finland's public sector is also a major economic generator, employing almost a quarter of the country's total workforce in 2015.

A short section of the report introduces the idea of an AI assistant to help expedite government operations, which is one of the more interesting parts of the paper:

“In the private sector, there are several examples of artificial intelligence being used to benefit humans. The smart phone is one such enslaved worker. Siri from Apple and Bixby from Samsung are personal slaves that learn to serve you, the user, exactly. Why shouldn't the government follow suit?”

According to the report, work on “Aurora,” a national customer service and general AI assistant open to all Finnish people and aimed to assist in identifying and accessing public services, is now underway. The report, on the other hand, makes no mention of how or when the assistant will be built.

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“What can you do, Aurora?”

Aurora would be the first AI assistant created by and for a government, joining a bevvy of private AI assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google Assistant. The Aurora proposal has precedent in Finnish government services, since the Finnish Immigration Service currently employs a robotic assistant to answer calls in a variety of languages and automatically route callers to appropriate institutions for specific queries and requests.

So, what will Aurora be able to accomplish? We don't really know at this moment. Apart from the statement that work on the project has begun, the report has scant details. Furthermore, a Google search on the relevant terms (Aurora, AI, assistant, Finland, etc.) yields almost nothing, with the exception of a brief mention on the City of Helsinki's website that says, "Finland is building, and soon will use, the citizen's virtual assistant Aurora, through which Finns can talk directly with the public authorities."

Knowing what other AI assistants can do, on the other hand, allows us to hypothesise on how Aurora could help Finland's government. A public sector AI assistant, like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Bixby, should use natural language processing (NLP) to take open-ended requests for information or assistance and lead users properly. In the commercial sector, this capability has already revolutionised customer service, with an increasing number of businesses using "smart" phone answering systems and chatbots to save time and labour.

Scheduling for public sector appointments and services, emergency alerts for crisis situations, and even recommender systems for areas like career services or health care (e.g., "There's a career fair you might be interested in" or "Here's where you can get a flu shot") are examples of more complex functionality.

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The Federal AI Personal Assistant Program in the United States

While Aurora, Finland's AI helper, would be the first solo AI assistant for public services, other countries have looked into how AI assistant technology could be used. The US General Services Administration (GSA) launched the US Federal AI Personal Assistant Program in 2017, a collaborative initiative aimed at “... the effective, efficient, and accountable introduction and benchmarking of public service information integration into consumer-available AI Personal Assistants (IPAs) such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, Oracle Adaptive IntelliSense, and others.”

The initiative has gathered a variety of fascinating hypotheses and use cases for how existing AI assistants can connect with US public services through in-person hackathons and forums on its Github page. Users may ask Google or Alexa queries like "What are the optimum settings for my thermostat?" and "What is the best sort of insulation for my home?" with the Department of Energy integration, for example. On the GSA's Github, the public is invited to submit recommendations and ideas.

More information on Finland's Aurora initiative will be available in April 2019, when the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment's AI steering committee aims to release a new, more comprehensive report.