Looking to ease the growing frustration of motorists and area business owners, city officials recently took action — they rolled out a chatbot.
It went live Nov. 3, with the aim of answering questions about the street work, which has stymied parts of Lower Broadway for four years.
"Talkin' Broadway represents the first initiative of its kind for the City, offering an innovative and inclusive solution to bridge the information gap between the city's construction projects and the public," a news release announcing the project boasted.
The announcement was accompanied by a short video, edited to mimic silent films, showing San Antonians how to use the bot.
But the chatbot stumbled through its launch. It was glitchy, often kicking back incorrect or unhelpful answers to users' questions.
The news outlet Axios San Antonio outlined the bot's shortcomings on Nov. 6, including its frequent inability to give clear answers to simple questions, such as: What type of work is being done on Broadway?
City officials scrambled to make the chatbot function as advertised. A flurry of emails between staffers and Hello Lamp Post, the London-based company that created and manages the "Talkin' Broadway" chatbot, showed signs of panic setting in.
"We need this addressed quickly," John Peterek, assistant to City Manager Erik Walsh, said in an email. "Local media is finding issues that we asked to be corrected before launch. Please advise."
The Express-News obtained 377 pages of chatbot-related emails as well as bot response data through an open records request.
When will Broadway reopen? That was one of the many questions city spokesman Brian Chasnoff asked the chatbot as he tested its capabilities. First, the bot gave him a reply about "Broadway theatres in San Antonio." Then it incorrectly said crews would complete the work later that day.
When asked for shops to visit on Broadway, the bot spit out the names of businesses across San Antonio, many of them far from Broadway.
Several of the responses had not been pre-approved by the city, despite officials requesting that the tool shoot out replies from a bank of carefully written answers. (This is not cutting-edge technology.)
It turned out that Hello Lamp Post had made a critical mistake when it launched "Talkin' Broadway:" employees did not turn off an artificial intelligence feature as San Antonio officials had requested.
The city wanted to roll out the chatbot with pre-approved answers before deciding whether to allow AI technology to answer users' questions. Using AI would require a city employee to constantly monitor the answers it gives, and Chief Innovation Officer Brian Dillard said the city does not currently have the capacity to do that.
The AI feature was shut off the same Monday the Axios article ran.
That day was the bot's busiest, according to data covering its first seven weeks on the job. It received 160 questions that day — many of them from Chasnoff.
It has broken the 100-response mark only two other times since Nov. 6. Indeed, since peaking in the first week after its launch, the chatbot has had at least five days in which no one asked it anything.
A response is when someone sends a message to the tool. There can be numerous responses in a single conversation. Hello Lamp Post cannot track how many people have used the bot since responses are anonymous, but the company estimated in December that there were about 220 users — and it's unclear how many of those questioners worked for the city.
Most conversations with the chatbot are short, with people often just making it through the first couple of prompted questions before dropping out of the conversation altogether. Chasnoff has had the longest conversation with the bot by far, asking dozens of questions.
The city's Office of Innovation spent about $14,000 for Hello Lamp Post to build and run the bot. Chasnoff said the city will continue to evaluate Talkin' Broadway through the summer, when construction along Lower Broadway is slated to end.
The city might use the chatbot for other construction projects, if it's deemed worthwhile.
"I think it does provide a lot of utility for the city, like the ability to collect feedback 2 4/7, instantly," Chasnoff said. "I don't know if there is any other tool like that. I see a lot of potential. We're going to have to really look at the data before we evaluate whether or not it's a worthy investment."
How it works
Construction along Lower Broadway from East Houston Street to Interstate 35 kicked off in 2020. The $42 million, 2017 bond project includes roadway reconstruction, new sidewalks and lighting and utility upgrades, among other improvements.
The Office of Innovation started looking into creative ways to disseminate information about the project at District 1 Councilwoman Sukh Kaur's request.
"We wanted to make sure that we're getting information into the hands of people in a more expedited way that wasn't a static website that's not really changing," Kaur said.
The first-term councilwoman, who beat then-incumbent Mario Bravo in a June run-off election, was trying to avoid the kind of backlash that Bravo weathered when roadwork on North St. Mary's Street took longer than anticipated. The project effectively shut down the St. Mary's Strip for the better part of two years, hurting live-music venues, bars and restaurants and bedeviling area residents — many of whom bitterly complained about the city's lack of communication, pushing officials to hold regular community meetings.
The 40 signs posted up along Lower Broadway sidewalks have a QR code for people to access the chatbot. The signs also provide a phone number for people without smartphones.
The bot walks users through a series of questions, letting them share their opinions about the construction and ask questions. It also links to a list of businesses in the area and gives the history of nearby landmarks.
Using Talkin' Broadway
The chatbot struck Brandon Howard, president of local software development company Zelficam, as "a little inefficient."
"It's a lot of work to get useful information," he said.
Howard praised the bot for having a texting option — to make it available to as many people as possible — but said it made little sense to go through a chat when many of the answers direct users to a website with more information. He also said that in several conversations he'd started with the chatbot, it abruptly stopped responding.
It might make more sense to just have a QR code that links people to a frequently-asked-questions page, he said.
"It's a novelty, in my opinion," Howard said of the bot.
Howard is OK with the city's decision to forgo using AI since bots with AI capabilities can be pushed into giving inappropriate replies.
"What AI is really good at is giving you these very dynamic answers, connecting the dots, things of that nature," Howard said. "However, it's really easy to trick it as well. And if there aren't safeguards in place, it's very possible to make your very public site become become a PR nightmare. So there's really good reasons not to use AI for this."
While business owner Zach Garza said the tool isn't perfect, he is happy to see the city making an effort to improve communication about long-term construction projects. He said it's better than the confusion and unanswered questions that friends of his dealt with on North St. Mary's Street.
"Their businesses have just disintegrated in their fingertips because there was no communication — there was no effort by the city," he said.
Garza co-owns the Garaje Cantina, a bar based in the Make Ready Market food hall between Avenue B and Broadway. He was featured in a promotional video the city made about Talkin' Broadway.
Garza thinks it could be useful for people who drop by his cantina.
"I think that it is helpful and at the very worst, it's something," he said. "At least the city is doing something."
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