Home
Case Studies
City of Helsinki
The City of Helsinki is enhancing the way different languages are supported in their customer care chatbots. IBM Client Engineering and the City of Helsinki collaborated on a Proof of Value (POV) to showcase how IBM watsonx.ai™ could elevate customer care with advanced language translation and summarization capabilities. The POV brought the talents of both IBM Consulting® and IBM Client Engineering to the effort.
Initially, the POV demonstrated that IBM watsonx.ai is proficient in translating questions in foreign language into Finnish, the chatbot’s base language to increase intent recognition. The answers given are pre-written and checked to avoid mistakes. The current City of Helsinki’s customer care solution supports three languages (Finnish, English and Swedish), and watsonx.ai was piloted to select the most suitable Large Language Model (LLM) for translation. City of Helsinki has set a high bar for translation, and watsonx.ai performed on par with the currently used system in this critical function.
IBM Client Engineering and IBM Consulting facilitated a series of Innovate Workshops with the City of Helsinki team that designed the POV approach, addressed challenges and culminated in the conclusion that watsonx.ai could be the new translation solution for City of Helsinki. This collaborative effort demonstrated how the solution can be further developed to meet their needs and integrated into their infrastructure, promising an elevated customer care experience for Helsinki’s citizens.
To measure the quality of the translation, IBM used the intent recognition metric that is specific for the City of Helsinki solution and the COMET score that is an open-source framework for machine translation evaluation. Watsonx.ai was shown to be on par with the current translation solution on COMET score:
- For English to Finnish, watsonx.ai scored 0.90 and current solution scored 0.91 (out of 1.0)
- For Swedish to Finnish, watsonx.ai scored 0.87 and current solution scored 0.86 (out of 1.0)
The City of Helsinki (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a government entity that provides a large number of services for its 650,000 citizens. Those services cover a wide range of areas, from healthcare to education to land use. With approximately 38,000 employees, the city is Finland’s largest employer.
Legal
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2024. IBM Corporation, New Orchard Road, Armonk, NY 10504.
Produced in the United States of America, April 2024.
IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, IBM Consulting, and watsonx.ai are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation, in the United States and/or other countries. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on A current list of IBM trademarks is available on ibm.com/legal/copyright-trademark.
This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates.
All client examples cited or described are presented as illustrations of the manner in which some clients have used IBM products and the results they may have achieved. Actual environmental costs and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual client configurations and conditions. Generally expected results cannot be provided as each client’s results will depend entirely on the client’s systems and services ordered. THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided.