Georgia launches chatbot to help residents navigate state services
Georgia’s Secretary of State’s office has launched a chatbot designed to help residents find government information online rather than searching through multiple webpages or calling the agency for assistance.
GABBY, short for Georgia’s Automated Bot Built for You, provides answers using information published on the Secretary of State’s website, according to an announcement from Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger.
The chatbot, which residents can access at sos.ga.gov, is part of the office’s effort to modernize its operations and make government services more accessible. Officials say the tool is intended to reduce time residents spend looking for government information and ease the workload on the agency’s call center employees.
“Georgians shouldn’t have to spend their time searching through a government website or waiting on the phone to get a simple question answered,” Raffensperger said Thursday. “GABBY puts information at Georgians’ fingertips and is another step toward making government more accessible, efficient, and responsive to the people we serve.”
Government chatbots have become increasingly common, helping residents navigate services ranging from voting to driver’s license renewals.
According to a 2020 tally by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, nearly 75% of states deployed chatbots to assist government employees with providing services related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Several chatbots were specialized to address needs created by the pandemic, but several state technology chiefs had been exploring the technology prior to March 2020, in anticipation of the right business case.
Kirsten Wyatt, senior director of the Digital Service Network at the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation and Georgetown University, told StateScoop in 2024 that the pandemic was instrumental in making chatbots more commonplace.
“I think that [the pandemic] prompted the need to be able to really swiftly and consistently give information to people about government services, and then, as we’ve seen, a rise in interest in citizen or customer experience,” she said. “Chatbots really have become a cornerstone of making sure that somebody, when they’re accessing government services, can understand or be able to ask a question in their own way to get to what they need.”
Georgia’s launch of GABBY builds on the state Department of Labor’s Georgia A.I., a chatbot that helps residents find information about unemployment insurance, job searches and tax forms. State officials previously reported that the tool had handled more than 2.5 million interactions since its launch in 2022.
Other states are also expanding their use of automated assistants.
Arizona’s secretary of state updated its BallotBot chatbot in July to provide voters with expanded information ahead of the November midterm elections. State officials say the tool is offered “to supplement, not replace, the assistance available from county election officials” and the secretary of state’s office.
California’s new AI-powered digital assistant Poppy, which launched last September, is helping employees speed through bureaucratic hurdles within a secure ecosystem that keeps government data on official networks. Named after the state’s official flower, Poppy is a generative artificial intelligence tool designed by the state to be used only by state workers. It operates on a secure, state-government network, and it only pulls information from official CA.gov websites to ensure sensitive data is not compromised.
Similarly, GABBY’s reliance on information from the Secretary of State’s website is intended to keep its responses grounded in official agency resources. The Thursday announcement did not specify whether the chatbot uses generative artificial intelligence or provide details about its underlying technology.
