Connecting You Now

Overview — Connecting You Now is an intelligent virtual concierge assistant that helps users find the right service or product for their needs through conversational AI and back-end machine-learning matching. It is designed to empower digitally excluded communities through an inclusively designed, ethical AI solution.

How it is used — It responds to the challenge that, while most of the UK population participates in a digital society, far fewer people with visual or hearing impairments can do so, alongside other digitally excluded groups such as those who find technology difficult to navigate or who do not speak English as a first language. As part of the Scottish Government's equality objectives, a CivTech challenge was sponsored to use AI, data and digital technologies to enable more inclusive access to public services, starting with disabled people, and the Scottish Government partnered with Insights Driven to co-develop the solution. Connecting You Now is an easy-to-integrate software-as-a-service platform that works alongside existing websites: a multimodal AI conversation at the front end understands user intent and sentiment to improve the relevance of the services suggested, while analytics learn from use and feedback to help optimise service descriptions and identify gaps and overlaps in provision.

Human oversight — Development and testing use human-centric design and involve people who have a sensory loss, to ground the solution in real experiences. The platform is developed with a commitment to ethical algorithm construction and to using large language models free of discrimination bias, and compliance with the EU Accessibility Directive is ensured through a partnership with NHS 24. Because the system uses commercial AI models that are continually updated, the team has developed an "AI Trust Harness" that tests the solution for bias, accuracy and transparency and monitors for solution drift.