Kamu is the name of Migri’s customer service chatbot (Migri stands for Maahanmuuttovirasto, the Finnish Immigration Service). Kamu answers commonly asked questions by providing pre-written answers and advises users on different application types. The project started in august 2017 and is still ongoing.

I was part of Kamu’s development during my whole time at Migri (over 3 years). My role in the project changed over the course of time: First, I was involved in establishing the project vision and goals, characteristics of the chatbot and working together with customer service experts to understand which content the chatbot can cover. In the next phase I helped setting up a dedicated chatbot team, understanding training needs and establishing working practices in an area completely unknown to the organisation. As the project progressed I was less involved in day to day tasks, but still evaluated the pilot, ran user tests,  helped in setting next milestones for the team and project and ran the voicebot experiment.

I encouraged the team to write about and publish their learnings about chatbot development, and contributed myself with a number of articles in medium, e.g., Meet Kamu - Co-designing a chatbot for immigrants.