A central registration office
The office's helpline answers company registration (private, public, foreign), the online portal, required documents, fees by authorised capital, name reservation, post-registration steps (PAN, VAT, ward) and annual compliance. It handled 1,236 calls in the 30 days to 1 November 2026, with up to ten callers at the same time on a single line. The AI uses a formal register, never invents a fee, and refers exact amounts to the portal or the office when the figure is not in its documents.
Two more central departments
A department dealing with industry registration and a department dealing with immigration run the same system under their own personas, together handling roughly 300 citizen calls a week. Each has a knowledge base of its procedures, documents and fees, and a directory for transfers.
Municipalities
A municipality in the Kathmandu valley and a rural municipality in the hills were the first; two sub-metropolitan cities and another rural municipality followed. What a municipal knowledge base looks like, from one sub-metropolitan city:
- 207 documents across 13 categories (acts, procedures, regulations, notices, policies), 73 services with documents and fees, 299 tax-rate rows by category and fiscal year, officials' contacts.
- In another city: the Local Government Operation Act's 121 sections as a tiered summary (a benchmark of 169 citizen questions went from 84% to 94.7% correct after the rewrite), 25 hospitals with free-bed quotas and focal persons, 24 ward representatives, an employment-service-centre section, and blood-bank and ambulance numbers.
- A staff-editable directory of about 50 people and numbers that both tells callers the number and lets the AI warm-transfer to it within office hours.
Scanned department PDFs are OCR-ingested, including Devanagari tables, so the AI cites the document rather than a summary of it.
Design choices for public bodies
| Choice | Why |
|---|---|
| Formal Nepali (हजुर, तपाईं) | Citizens expect an office, not a shop. |
| No invented information | If the fee or date is not in the documents, the AI says so and gives the office contact. |
| Numbers stored as spoken digit groups | Early calls read some phone numbers wrongly; storing them as digit words fixed it, verified against recordings. |
| Warm transfer only | The AI dials the officer and connects only when they answer; otherwise it takes a message. |
| Data in Nepal | Records, recordings and contacts on servers in Nepal; hybrid on-premise architecture specified for bodies that require it. |
| Identifies as AI | Asked whether it is a person, it says it is an AI assistant of the office. |
Results seen across deployments
Calls answered rose from the 40–60% typical of a busy office desk to about 95%, waiting time dropped to zero, coverage went from office hours to 24/7, and staff time was freed for the cases that need a person. The cost per handled call is a few rupees. The original 2026 write-up →