Personal Assistant Pilot Project: NPS Ranger

The National Park Service (NPS) has joined the US Federal AI Personal Assistant Pilot sponsored by the General Services Administration. This pilot project aims to introduce and integrate public service information into consumer-available AI Personal Assistants (e.g., Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, Google Assistant, and Facebook Messenger) in an effective, efficient, and accountable manner.

The NPS team is interested in making its data available through all the AI Personal Assistant platforms that are part of the pilot. As a first foray into this emerging field, we are developing a skill for the Amazon Alexa platform. The NPS Ranger skill communicates authoritative, often-requested information about parks to better address our visitors’ needs.

NPS Ranger uses data from the NPS Application Programming Interface (API) to allow a user to ask for a variety of information about national parks. Users can ask for random NPS trivia and a list of NPS sites in any US state as well as the following items for any individual NPS site:

  • Alerts
  • Contact information
  • Description
  • Directions
  • Events
  • News

Check back to learn how to enable NPS Ranger once it’s available.

Last updated: June 8, 2018

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