The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has launched a Virtual Assistant service for the general public in all 126 Greek Consular Authorities in 85 countries.
The new Virtual Assistance service aims to improve the provision and quality of services offered by the Greek Consular Authorities for both Greek citizens who reside or are abroad, as well as for foreigners, without requiring their physical presence at the Consular Authorities, regarding various consular services.
The Virtual Assistant is already available in all Consular Authorities, in Greek and English, as well as in French, German, and Spanish in countries where these languages are spoken. Using artificial intelligence, the service will evolve and provide citizens with guidance and information in a total of 19 languages*.
The Virtual Assistant acts as a "digital employee", interacting with the user, understanding, and answering in written questions, via a digital channel (Consular Authority Website, Facebook Messenger, or Viber). It also recommends to the user the actions to take, depending on the question, regarding each consular service.
In a short time, the Virtual Assistant will direct the citizen to the new request management platform being implemented by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and then the consular services will be provided entirely digitally, and requests will be processed online for all cases that do not require physical presence at the Consulate.
Thanks to this service, and those that will follow, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is changing, is dynamically entering the new era and is a global pioneer in new digital services that significantly improve communication and service to citizens abroad.
*The languages in which the Virtual Assistant will operate are: Greek, English, French, German, Spanish (already put into effect) and Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish (currently in progress, estimated completion by 3/2023).
The service is implemented in the framework of the project "Consular Services Process Transformation" and is funded by the Operational Programme "Public Sector Reform ", under the NSRF, ESF and National Funds.
December 5, 2022