Immigrating to the U.S. is a complicated process requiring substantial amount of time and the filing of a stack of documents. The process is not always intuitive — especially for those used to the bureaucratic systems of other countries — and many questions crop up along the way.

To help expedite the answering of those questions and keep the process moving for prospective citizens, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is preparing to launch a new automated virtual assistant in December.

Emma — named after poet Emma Lazarus, who composed the famous words at the base of the Statue of Liberty — is a robust virtual assistant tool that can understand and respond to a range of questions.

Emma is more than just a traditional search tool, according to Vashon Citizen, product owner for the project.

"If you ask Emma a question, she says here's the answer, just like you're talking to a real person and, if applicable, she'll actually take you to that page where you can get more information," she said. "We really see Emma as shadowing the experience of chatting with someone versus just going in and searching for information."

The tool is programmed to understand the way people use language to provide a more human feel, as well as a more seamless interaction.

"We're teaching Emma how to understand the different ways our customers are asking questions," Citizen said.

The tool is currently able to provide answers to 85 percent of questions posed to it, though the team hopes to get that number up to 95 percent in short order.

Prior to Emma, the only avenue for users to get answers was a 1-800 number. Agency call centers currently handle about 1.2 million calls per month, most of which are questions about general information that is available somewhere on the USCIS website.

"This is one piece of a big strategy we started implementing this year to enhance the digital experience, the online experience for our customers," Citizen said. "We want to be able to expand the different communications options available to our customers."

While Emma has some sophisticated language processing skills, it isn't quite at the level of artificial intelligence. The tool is slowly learning idioms and differences in sentence structure, however those lessons come at the hands of human developers combing through questions and responses on the backend during the pilot test.

The tool will officially launch on Dec. 2 but the development process won't end there.

Once the first version is live on the site, the development team — which includes USCIS employees and contractors with Verizon and subcontractor Next IT — will start teaching Emma other languages, starting with Spanish.

The team also plans to make the tool device-agnostic, enabling users to access Emma on mobile devices by early next year.

About Aaron Boyd

Aaron Boyd is an awarding-winning journalist currently serving as editor of Federal Times — a Washington, D.C. institution covering federal workforce and contracting for more than 50 years — and Fifth Domain — a news and information hub focused on cybersecurity and cyberwar from a civilian, military and international perspective.

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