Telford & Wrekin Council's Ask Tom AI system 'getting better at recognising local words and phrases'
A council’s automatic Ask Tom phone answering system is learning the local language in Telford, councillors have been told.
After the artificial intelligence (AI) system was launched as a trial in August 2024 it was condemned by one councillor as “universally awful”.
But Tom is getting better, a report to the council's audit committee noted.
As well as tweaks which allow the system to pass on calls to advisors much quicker, Ask Tom has also been given lessons in local words and phrases.
“Tom has also been trained to recognise local words and phrases better, for example it now understands that ‘Ab Dab’ refers to Abraham Darby,” said a report to Wednesday’s meeting (November 19).
It has also had its “knowledge base” refined to respond to a wider range of queries on leisure, school transport and Blue Badges.
The report noted that the council is continually looking for feedback and is using 'mystery customers' to do that.
The report noted that during the year the council received 31 complaints involving Ask Tom.
“All have been investigated and just two of these complaints were upheld,” the report noted.
Introduced with the aim of answering 30 per cent of queries it is now “consistently handling upwards of 39 per cent of customer enquiries without needing to pass them through to an advisor,” the report recorded.
It means that 21,834 calls were handled by Ask Tom from its launch in August 2024 to the end of March 2025.
Councillors were also told how Telford & Wrekin Council is in the “foothills” of how AI can be used across the country.
Only one app, Ask Tom, is currently public-facing but the meeting was told that other apps are being used behind the scenes.
One of the apps can listen to meetings and produce a minuted record of what is said, the committee was told.
An officer of the council told questioner Councillor Nathan England (Labour, The Nedge) that “we are at the foothills of AI".
“I think we are in the early days and Ask Tom is the first public-facing app.”
Anthea Lowe, the council’s director of policy and governance, told councillors that AI could be used to “maximise efficiency” but only in a “safe way".
