We are always looking for cool uses of the latest advancements — technology for good, one might say.
And in North Dakota, we found a use of a chatbot that fits that bill.
This past April, Prairie Public Broadcasting deployed “Ask Prairie Public” on its website.
It’s a homegrown piece of North Dakota tech. A Fargo-based firm, Chipp, developed the AI-based assistant.
Troy Davis, Prairie Public’s director of development, said the chatbot went through multiple rounds of testing and iterations to get it to where it is now.
“We’re still learning and tweaking it as people ask more questions,” he said.
Prairie Public Radio is heard throughout North Dakota on 11 full-power signals across the state, along with five FM translators. It offers three main programming channels: classical music with National Public Radio programming, “roots, rock and jazz” and flagship station KDSU’s feed.
It also blankets North Dakota as the state’s PBS television affiliate, Prairie Public Television.
The network had a specific use case in mind for the assistant. It offers a membership program called Passport, which gives extended access to PBS content to members who give $5 a month.
“What I realized was that our inboxes and voicemails would fill up on nights and weekends when people were sitting down and wanted to watch their favorite PBS program,” Davis said.
Davis or another Prairie Public staff member would call back the member the next morning, or on Monday if a call came in over the weekend. “But by then, it wasn’t usually a convenient time for them to sit down and work through the problem,” he explained.
Prairie Public desired a tool that could answer member questions when they needed help, especially outside of business hours.
The beauty, Davis explained, is that while the chatbot is automated, a Prairie Public staff member can take over in real time. “When a new conversation starts, we get an email notification, and sometimes I’ll follow along just to see how it responds,” he said.
Davis has stepped in on occasion when questions are so specific that they warrant human intervention.
Most of the time, however, Prairie Public has found the bot to be quite useful.
In fact, a friend of mine referred me to Ask Prairie Public in the first place, after it did a nice job describing the affiliate they heard during a recent long-distance FM reception opening.
So far, Ask Prairie Public has logged approximately 1,730 messages sent from around 330 unique users, and member response has been overwhelmingly positive.
“People love it,” Davis told us. “It has also given us another way to understand what questions our audience has and what we may need to communicate more clearly.”
“If we can make it a little easier for someone to use Passport, find a program and understand their membership, that’s a win,” Davis added.
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