King County Information Technology hosts Government Hackfest at Amazon

Virtual assistants

King County Information Technology and Amazon Web Services partnered on a two-day government Hack-a-thon to create government products that live in the Cloud, are aggressively analyzed, and get support from increasingly popular virtual assistants like Alexa.

More than 150 government team members from Seattle, King County, City of Bellevue, Snohomish County and others are developing products.

The most viable projects included:

• An Alexa-type assistant that directly connects users to King County services like pet licensing or a Public Health clinic.
• An Alexa-type assistant that will provide a verbal explanation of the Voter’s Guide or content in an initiative. This allows visually impaired voters to get official voter information delivered in a way that works best for them.
• Predictive analytics to maximize appointment bookings at King County Public Health clinics. The information could be used to identify barriers to keeping appointments.
• Real-time sentiment analysis of twitter feeds during large scale emergencies. Negative sentiments can be quickly identified to find an urgent, but currently unknown, issue like a closed road or health emergency. 

“People need nothing less than the best from their government,” said Tanya Hannah, King County Chief Information Officer. “We are excited to leverage the private sector expertise in our own backyard to deliver exceptional products for our community.”

King County will move the top projects quickly into production.