About Reading’s digital helper

Reading Borough Council’s digital helper uses artificial intelligence (AI) and information from our website to answer questions about Council Tax and waste.

It provides information and answers in a conversational way, helping you to find the right information and understand what to do next.

At the moment, the digital helper can answer common Council Tax and waste enquiries. This means the council can test, learn and improve the digital helper before rolling it out to more services.

Using the digital helper

On the website

On our website, the digital helper is known as RBC Chat. It can be found in the bottom right hand corner of the website on the Council Tax and waste pages. Simply select the icon to open and start a new chat.

On the phone

If you contact the council by phone, you will hear an introduction from the digital helper. The phone digital helper can support common Council Tax and waste enquiries, including bin collection checks.

If you choose to, the phone digital helper can send a link by text message to help you find the right information or complete a task online.

To get the best out of using the phone digital helper, we recommend:

• finding somewhere quiet away from background noise
• keeping questions simple
• speaking as clearly as possible

Sharing your feedback

We spoke to residents and carried out research to help shape the digital helper. We’d like to hear what you think.

You can complete a short survey at the end of each conversation, whether you’re using the phone service or web chat. You can tell us what worked well and what we could improve.

You can also share your feedback using the main feedback tab on our website.

Data privacy

View our full customer fulfilment centre, back-office call queues and virtual agents’ privacy notice.