Ottawa City

Ottawa City Skill logo
Ottawa City Skill utterance

When we think of Smart Cities, we usually think of new fancy technology on the road, smart traffic lights, special roads for self-driving cars, wi-fi everywhere, and an increasing number of “intelligent” sensors to improve the efficiency of operations and provision of services in a city, just to name a few. However, it’s precisely this latter the one that’s usually forgotten or overcomplicated.

Cities are supposed to serve their citizens, provide easy and rapid access to relevant and useful information in their day-to-day. Even so, it’s not always simple to access basic data or request city services. Cities rely, predominantly, on three channels: a website, a call center, or personally at an office. This means that a citizen requesting any service must either have some minimal tech knowledge, enough time to wait on the phone, or be able/willing to physically move to the city’s office.

We believe, there is a faster and easier way to do this... Voice

Inspiration

Canadians are known for participating in activities throughout the year, either outdoors or indoors, such as biking, jogging, playing basketball, hockey, or attending theater plays and concerts. Family activities are among the most popular, where kids can learn to paint, play a sport, run at the park, or just have fun. Such events, and others, serve as an excuse to gather people from around the city to spend some great time together. Furthermore, people want connections, they want to meet others with similar interests to make businesses and friendships.

We found ourselves one day thinking "what can we do today" and realized there isn't an easy way to figure that out. Furthermore, we talked to friends and they were all having the same concern!

Then, we started thinking: How could we make life easier for people in Ottawa wanting to find the perfect local inexpensive activity to share with friends, come across new people and grow their network?

The problem

Even if there are plenty of activities all year long, people in Ottawa don’t have an easy way to find out what’s going on in the city, other than browsing online.

Finding activities for the weekend or for a specific date is not always an easy task. Browsing through several pages and reading descriptions might also be annoying sometimes.

Similarly, the number of available events can be overwhelming and a challenge when a family is trying to find something fun to do in Ottawa, something that’s suited for children, pet-friendly and that’s free. Although most of this can be done online, there is an easier way:

How about just asking?

What it does

We have created a new Alexa Skill for the Echo devices, built as a pilot project specifically for the city of Ottawa. Our goal is to have a unique solution that connects the City with its citizens.

Families with an Echo device at home can just say: Alexa, ask Ottawa city what’s going on this weekend? And Alexa will say out loud a list of events happening this weekend in the city of Ottawa. Moreover, people can ask for more details and get a summary, detailed schedules and the location of the events.

The Ottawa City Skill for Alexa can also remind which garbage bin is collected this week, and which day it is collected. So, if an Ottawan has just moved, or is just too busy to remember such things, she can ask Alexa for the garbage collection schedule like: Alexa, which bin is collected this week? And get the details of the garbage collection schedule.

Besides just showing information, Smart Cities must provide two-way communication with their citizens. With the 3-1-1 service, the Ottawa City Skill enhances the city’s suite of services. Users can make 3-1-1 requests using voice, no need to call or to use a computer, just Ask Alexa: Alexa, tell Ottawa city to start a new 3-1-1 request for Drain Covers Alexa will start a dialogue, asking the right questions related to the issue presented by the citizen. It will post the request to the city’s servers and respond with a request ID, in case the user wants to check the status in the future.

Right now, this feature is in beta testing and only available for two service requests: Graffiti and Drain Covers. It is not posting the requests to the production server, so, requests made using the Skill are not being handled by the City.

How we built it

We used nodejs as the programming language and the events' information, as well as the user's location, is stored in a mongo database. The fulfillment app is running as a lambda function on AWS.

The information of the City events is obtained from the Open Data dataset publicly available from the Ottawa City's website. The same applies to the garbage collection schedules in the city.

Finally, the 3-1-1 service uses the Open 311 Web Service that's provided by the City. We requested an API to access it and to post new requests.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we didn't know that the information was available in Open Data datasets and we were scraping the events' details directly from the website. Later on, we entered in contact with the City and knew about this service which helped us not just to solve scraping issues but also to increase the number of services we could provide within the Skill.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The original goal of the Ottawa City Skill was to provide an easy way to find interesting activities occurring in the city so that people could share time with friends and family. However, after a couple of months of being live, we knew we could do much more than just events' information. So, we decided to add two new services: garbage collection schedule and 3-1-1 requests. We believe that providing such services (and more coming) certainly pushes Ottawa even more as a Smart City. Being right there, on Ottawans’ homes, is an open window for potential ways to, not just inform, but to connect with the public.

Moreover, since the Ottawa City provides bilingual services (English and French), we have recently made available the French version of the Skill. Ottawans at their homes can set their Echo device in French and just say: Alexa, activez Ville d'Ottawa

And all the same features will be served in French.

What we learned

We've had various challenges and lessons. We learned that going from the idea to the solution is not a straight path but using the Alexa resources on the web helps a lot to ease it.

We learned what the Open Data is, how it works, what can it provide, and more importantly, how spread it is. We have found datasets with all kinds of information available in hundreds of cities around the world.

And we also learned that the best way to start is to give the first step. We built this Alexa Skill with a single feature and along the way, we have enhanced that one and added two more.

Think big - start small - listen to our client (the people) - grow

What's next for Ottawa City

We have several plans for this Skill. Currently, we are working on adding more 3-1-1 request types and testing so this feature can be out of beta soon. Also, we started to develop a new feature for public transportation schedules, we are using the Open Data datasets of the OCTranspo buses and the soon-to-come OTrain.

Our goal is to create a suite of features that can be ported to other cities in Canada and the US. Given the flexibility of the Language Model and the similarity of the Open Data datasets, doing this shouldn't be a great challenge.

The Challenge we are giving ourselves is taking this Skill to a macro level, where people don't need to enable it but just call it like: Alexa, what's going on today?

And Alexa, given the user's location, will know exactly which City it should call to respond the query. So people can even use it when they are away from home using their phones or their Smart Car Systems.