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Good practice Imported

Emma — the USCIS virtual assistant

United States of America · Washington · See the United States of America profile · See the Washington profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 35% 67/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

USCIS's bilingual virtual assistant 'Emma' answers about 456,000 immigration questions a month — correctly handling ~90% in English and ~86% in Spanish — easing pressure from over a million monthly calls.

~456,000
Questions answered per month
~90%
Correct resolution rate (English)
~86%
Correct resolution rate (Spanish)
>1 million
Monthly calls to USCIS (context)

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
Keywords
Service delivery, bilingual, chatbot, immigration services, virtual assistant

Context

Emma is the virtual assistant on the USCIS website, named after poet Emma Lazarus, that helps people find immigration information and navigate the site in English and Spanish; it was introduced to relieve the load of over a million monthly calls to USCIS by offering 24/7 self-service.

Objectives

Help users find immigration information and navigate USCIS's website bilingually, reducing call-centre demand.

Activities

An automated Q&A and navigation assistant embedded on the USCIS website, answering common questions in English and Spanish.

Results

Emma answers an average of around 456,000 questions per month, correctly resolving roughly 90% of common questions in English and 86% in Spanish, and is used nearly twice as much as the site's search function.

Conclusions

Described as a solid, dependable example of bilingual self-service at a high-demand agency — effective and well-used, if more modest in scope and novelty than generative-AI assistants.

Implementation

Implementation detail (cost, timeline, staffing, conditions for success) is not yet available for this practice.

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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