Applying an Arabic Conversational Agent in the Jordanian E-Government

This paper discusses a prototype idea of applyinga Conversational Agent (CA) to be embedded into the Jordanian E-government websites. The Conversational Agent is a smart system used to handle natural conversations between user and machine. A Jordanian citizen facing struggles when he/she want to apply for a service through the E-government portal.In addition the Jordanians struggling when searched for a piece of information (for example the needed documents for a specific service) inside the E-government websites. This struggling comes from number of reasons such as the needed knowledge that the user could have to deal with such services and the big number of links that the user must visitto achieve his/her target. In addition, the Jordanian E-Government websites does not meet the users' requirements in their design. Instead, this paper proposes the idea of applying a prototype called CA into those websites as a general helpdesk automated service to save the Jordanians time and effort. Simply, the user will chat with the proposed CA with what he/she coming to do through the targeted website using a text based Arabic conversations. The CA's responses might be the exact needed link or the targeted information. Such a proposed service will strength the Jordanian E-government platform especially for accessibility and usability factors and as to best of our knowledge, no country has been applied it before.