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Have a Montgomery County election question? You can ask Mo.
That’s right, Mo. The black-and-white, clickable, robotic dog seated on the bottom-right corner of the Montgomery County voter services website.
Mo is an AI chatbot created to answer basic election questions.
Just don’t ask Mo who to vote for.
“I’m not able to help with candidate recommendations or voting advice — that falls outside what I’m here for!” is the answer Mo types out when asked.
The generative AI chatbot only relies on verified information from the voter services website and the county geographic information system, according to Montgomery County. Don’t believe it? Ask Mo who won the 2020 presidential election.
“For questions about past election results, I’d recommend checking a trusted news source or the official Pennsylvania election results website,” is Mo’s response.
From locating a polling location to instructions on how to submit a mail ballot, Mo has the 24/7 capability to spit back an answer and translate it into more than 70 languages. Montgomery County created Mo with the aid of Citibot, a Charleston, South Carolina-based software company that specializes in crafting chatbots for local governments.
“Given all the disinformation that’s out there, we wanted to compete and be able to get accurate information out into the world and the way to do that is to use AI for public good,” Commissioner Neil Makhija said.
Leading up to an election, the county can field “a thousand calls a day” regarding voting, Makhija said, so it was decided to find an easy way to make the information easily accessible.
To that end, Mo received hours of training. Privacy and security were top priorities during the build-out phase, Makhija said, and to that end, Mo does not gather or store any personal information.
“This is not a generalized chatbot that roams the internet as an AI agent,” he said. “This is something that only pulls information from what we have determined is accurate and should be made accessible to more people.”
