Image courtesy of city of Homewood
Bugsy’s back! The worm that had been the jungle gym apparatus at Homewood Central Park is coming back in a form more compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
It will be the chatbot tool that will guide Homewood residents in their pursuit of information on the city’s website — and beyond.
“Right now, we have a lot of information on our website,” said Brian Wallace, the city’s communications director. “This bot is … going to allow residents to come to our website and say, ‘Hey, I had a variance for my property at 123 Oxmoor Road.’ They don’t even have to have the date. The bot is going to go search all of our records, everything in there, and be able to give them an instant answer as to where it is.”
Photo by Solomon Crenshaw Jr
Brian Wallace, Homewood’s communications director, believes the Bugsy chatbot will help people find information more quickly on the city’s website and elsewhere.
But you might even call Bugsy a bookworm because it can do more, accessing all of Homewood’s ordinances and other websites, including those for the Homewood Police Department and Homewood Parks and Recreation Department.
“If there’s information that can be gleaned from those other things, it will be able to provide that information in a split second,” Wallace said.
And don’t worry about not making your question clear to Bugsy. It speaks more than 70 languages.
“It’s going to provide a great opportunity for those who are struggling with the English language,” the communications director said.
For anyone unfamiliar with the original Bugsy, it was a brightly painted caterpillar that children used as a climbing apparatus at Homewood Central Park dating back to the 1980s. It became a well-known fixture for generations of children, but when the city overhauled the playground recently, Bugsy was deemed unsafe because it didn’t meet modern playground codes.
Some people bemoaned the idea of losing Bugsy and all the memories that came with it, so city officials set it aside to be repurposed as an artistic or nonclimbing park feature.
But when it came time to find a name for the city’s new chatbot, they had a contest and put a call out to the public, Wallace said. “We posted on social, and we had a focus group. There were two names that were at the top of the list, and we went with Bugsy.”
Bugsy will return as the chatbot around mid-August. And it will be even more user-friendly in the future, Wallace said. The chatbot also will guide users when the thing for which they’re looking isn’t on a city of Homewood site.
“Let’s say somebody’s coming on our site and they’re looking for something in Mountain Brook, but they don’t know the difference,” Wallace said. “Our bot will say, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t find any information, but maybe check with Mountain Brook. Here is their website.’
“The hope is that people will be able to find things. Not just find things, but find things quickly,” Wallace said. “We, for a long time, have been able to grow our base of information, providing a way for people to find out a lot of things about the city. It has expanded exponentially with new leadership, with new ideas. … This is just a part of that growth. Personally, I think it’s necessary for anybody as AI becomes such an intricate part of our lives.”
