According to the strategy of the Register of Enterprises, in the near future the services of the Register will be available only electronically. For this reason, already in 2017 the Register started a gradual reduction of working hours for the services provided in presence, on the one hand, and development of new support tools for receiving e-services, on the other hand.

“There were a lot of talks then of an artificial intelligence as a future opportunity and we decided to try. Let’s be as innovative as our customers – businessmen! Now – after one year of activities – we are satisfied with the results and the initial goals have been achieved. Therefore, we start a new phase of development – UNA service in English, thus participating in improvement of the business environment and development of relations between the state and investors,” the Chief State Notary of the Register of Enterprises Guna Paidere tells.  

At the moment UNA has become a stable support in the service of Latvian customers – in 30% of cases the customers of the Register of Enterprises prefer communication with the virtual assistant that allows to unburden the employees from uniform, monotonous activities or standard answers to standard questions, using human resources for solving of more complicated issues instead.  UNA reduces the waiting time of telephone consultations and the number of abandoned telephone consultations, as well as marks new habits in the communication of public administration and customers, for example, the most popular question in the late evening hours from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. is “How to register SIA?”, and creates new professional challenges for the employees of the Register, for example, a customer service specialist has become a chatbot trainer.

The approach implemented by the Register of Enterprises - inclusion of the artificial intelligence or virtual assistant UNA into the quality system - received the highest appraisal in the world from the Chartered Quality Institute, which unites internationally certified auditors of organizations and engineers, in the competition “International Quality Award 2018” in the category Innovation through Quality Method.

The solution of the virtual assistant UNA in English, the same as the Latvian version, is being developed by the company Tilde. “Smartness of the solution of the Register of Enterprises is ensured by the Tilde platform of virtual assistants, which includes state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technologies.  The neural circuitry system created by our researchers learns answering questions through analysis of various examples of dialogues. Thus, a computer may communicate with the user in the form of a free dialogue, is able to answer questions and helps solving issues.  We take special care to ensure that the system freely communicates in Latvian, English and other languages. The English virtual assistants of Tilde already for several years have been communicating with hundreds of thousands of users all over the globe, which provides valuable experience in creating the assistant of the Register of Enterprises,” the head of Tilde Andrejs Vasiļjevs tells.  

Currently UNA is able to understand around 500 types of questions in English and knows 1473 answers about the registration services of merchants. In order to assess the abilities of the UNA system and contribute to its smartness, the Register of Enterprises and Tilde start the first public test of the English version of the virtual tool and invite voluntary testers to apply, writing to e-mail una@ur.gov.lv. Testers will have an opportunity to chat with UNA, asking questions about specific topics. Later the robot trainer of the Register of Enterprises together with colleagues will summarize the conversations obtained during the test and together with the team of developers will improve answers and scenarios provided by UNA in English. It means that the first test will be followed by the improvement work of the tool and repeated tests, therefore customers will be able to use it as a daily customer support. 

At the same time the Register of Enterprises is currently working on the development of new e-services, among other of the e-services in English. UNA in English will be a support tool for investors, which will wish to use the e-services in English.

It is planned that UNA in English, similar to UNA in Latvian, will be available on the website of the Register www.ur.gov.lv, as well as in the Facebook Messenger application of the Register of Enterprises on the 24/7h basis.  It is convenient to use the services of the virtual assistant on smart devices as well as it operates in the responsive design.