German AI chatbot seeks to make it easier for voters to decide who to vote for

This weekend, around 60 million Germans are being called to vote. However, according to surveys, around 30% are still undecided as to who they should vote for on Sunday.

Tools such as Wahl-O-Mat, which provides users with a political quiz before giving an answer at the end, are particularly helpful for them. They help in ascertaining which political parties and their corresponding programmes best align with their own values. In addition to Wahl-O-Mat, there is now another way to find out about government programmes, but without having to read hundreds of pages.

Wahl.chat is an AI-supported chatbot developed by a group of German doctoral students at the renowned British University of Cambridge. Their goal: to make politics more accessible and provide voters with simple guidance.

Euronews spoke to Michel Schimpf, one of the developers, about how to make a political chatbot apolitical and how to get voters interested in politics.

We are a five-member German team that came to Cambridge University to conduct research together. Like many others at the moment, we probably talk a lot about politics over lunch. We thought about how we could make a small contribution to that.

Then we came up with the election and just started programming. We launched the bot just under a month ago. Since then, everything has gone pretty quickly.

If users have questions about a particular party and want to know: "Okay, what does party X say about education policy now, for example?" Then you can go to the chatbot and select the party and ask about it.

Other examples can be, what do you want to do for better education? Or, sow do you want to boost the economy? And then our chatbot gives an answer based on the parties' election programmes.

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