There is some harrumphing about Humphrey.
True, it’s a small sample size, but two Orland Park residents took time to come to the Village of Orland Park Board of Trustees meeting on Oct. 5 to take issue with the performance of AI chatbot Humphrey.
In late August, the village started to use Humphrey to handle residents’ questions via the village’s main number and on the website.
Residents Pam Stepansky and Karen Drake, however, have not had success with the new system.
“I called four times,” Stepansky said. “There was a second call, third call, fourth call…I never could be connected to a person at all.
“It kept saying I would be connected to a person, and this was like 11 a.m. on a weekday. I can’t believe we can’t talk to anybody in the village. There must be something wrong with this AI system. It needs to be fixed.”
She also had an issue that she can’t come into Village Hall to talk to someone because “there is no longer an information desk.”
Drake said she also had a bad experience with the Humphrey system.
“I tried so hard to ask a question about the Pumpkin Party and it was exhausting trying to get through,” she said. “And the Humphrey…that’s not working. I had to come in physically and try to get the issue that I was having taken care of.
“It was like two hours of my time. I used to be able to call, and you would get a person. I don’t know what’s going on but I wish it can be looked into.”
Mayor James Dodge said it will get looked into.
“We will follow up directly on those issues,” Dodge said. “A human will call you.”
Humphrey was named in the honor of Orland Park’s first mayor, John Humphrey, and during the Sept. 9 Committee of the Whole meeting, Director of Information Technology Tad Spencer talked about the bot in the first few weeks since using it.
“It is an AI driven chatbot that will provide faster, more accessible and trusted information,” Spencer said. “It is grounded information only based on what we provide it.
“It is not going to be able to access general internet information. It does not provide information outside of what we tell it to do.”
Residents can use it via the village’s website at orlandpark.org and by calling the village’s main number at 708-403-6100.
Spencer said Humphrey is available in 75 languages.
In this world of hacking and misinformation, Spencer said that Humphrey is only going to use information that the village is going to supply.
At that meeting, Dodge said that this will be an efficient way to talk to the right people quicker.
“I wanted to make sure that when people call the village, they didn’t get trapped in an old-school phone system,” Dodge said then. “We are asking the residents to understand how we are structured and how we allocate work so when we have an inbound request for service or a question – let this thing figure out how to put them into a better place pretty quickly.”
