Council Chatbot

Try Before You Buy

About NDX

NDX (National Digital Exchange) is a government platform that helps public sector organisations discover, evaluate, and adopt digital solutions.

Overview

Learning Artifact: This is a pre-deployed demonstration environment for learning and exploration, not a production-ready product. Use it to understand how AWS AI services work together for local government use cases.

Deployed and ready - no setup required. When you request this sandbox, you’ll receive access to a fully configured AI chatbot system that’s already running and ready to explore.

This Council Chatbot scenario demonstrates how local authorities can use AWS AI services to create an intelligent chatbot that answers resident questions about council services, policies, and procedures.

What you’ll explore

This sandbox includes a working implementation using:

Amazon Bedrock - Foundation models for natural language understanding and response generation
Amazon Lex - Conversational interface for structured dialogue flows
AWS Lambda - Serverless compute for business logic and integrations
Amazon S3 - Storage for knowledge base documents and conversation logs

In plain English: You’ll explore an AI that answers resident questions - like “When is bin collection?” or “How do I apply for a parking permit?” - using a combination of pre-defined conversation flows and generative AI responses.

Learn More

Before requesting your sandbox, explore the scenario documentation to understand what’s deployed and how to interact with it:

View Council Chatbot scenario details

Getting started

Select “Try this now for 24 hours” above
Accept the Acceptable Use Policy
Receive AWS SSO credentials via email
Access your sandbox environment through AWS Console
Follow the scenario guide to interact with the deployed chatbot

Why this matters for local government

Council chatbots can:

Reduce call centre load by handling common enquiries automatically
Provide 24/7 service for residents outside office hours
Improve accessibility with consistent, patient responses
Free up staff to handle complex cases requiring human judgement

This scenario lets you evaluate whether AI-powered chatbots could work for your council’s specific needs.

Constraints

Budget limit: $50 maximum spend (sufficient for extensive exploration)
Duration: 24 hours from activation
Purpose: Evaluation only (non-production use)
No cost to you - the budget is provided by NDX:Try

Important Notes

Resource Lifecycle Warning: All resources in your sandbox will be automatically deleted when your session time expires OR when the budget limit is reached (whichever comes first). Do not store important data in this environment.

Before your session ends

Export any configurations or code snippets you want to keep
Take screenshots of dashboards or metrics
Document any insights or findings
Download any generated artifacts

How this was built

This scenario is built with open source infrastructure as code. You can view the CloudFormation template, understand how it works, and adapt it for your own needs.

View the source code on GitHub (opens in new tab)

Build your own

After exploring this pre-deployed scenario, use the Empty Sandbox to build your own solution from scratch. The Empty Sandbox gives you a clean AWS environment where you can experiment freely.

Explore more scenarios

Empty AWS Sandbox - Start fresh with a clean AWS environment
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Planning AI - Intelligent document analysis
Text to Speech - Accessibility audio generation

Troubleshooting

Try button not working? Make sure you’re signed in to NDX
Did not receive credentials? Check your spam folder, or wait a few minutes
Cannot access the scenario? Ensure you’re using the correct AWS region (us-east-1)
Budget exhausted early? Some services have higher costs - contact support if unexpected

Support

For technical issues during your sandbox session, contact the NDX team at ndx@dsit.gov.uk.