If you live in Veneto and you still have to book an appointment for the anti-Covid vaccine, there is a new Telegram bot for you. It’s called Serenissimo, it’s free, and it’s activated very simply: just look for it as “serenissimo_bot ”in the messaging app on iPhone or Android and start a conversation, as you would with a friend’s contact.
A bot that cannot be more Venetian, starting from the phrase with which it welcomes users: “Hi, me is Serenissimo and me gà programmà par darte na man coa reservasiòn del vacino”. The dialect scattered here and there in the bot’s answers is not parochialism, but a nostalgic quirk of its creator, Alberto Granzotto, a Venetian programmer who has lived in Berlin for more than eight years.
“Serenissimo was born from a family necessity – Granzotto tells Italian Tech – I wanted to help my mother, who is in her 70s, book a vaccine appointment on the region’s website. She had come to visit the site up to ten times a day, and each time she had to re-enter the same data to check availability. I thought that this process could be simplified with a bot, automating the various steps of entering information “.
How Serenissimo works
At the first start, the bot asks the user to select the ULSS to which he belongs from a list, then the tax code and the last six digits of the health card, that is the data necessary to access the reservations. “Once the information has been collected, Serenissimo check the availability on the Region’s website every hour – explains Granzotto – When he finds a free appointment, he sends a chat notification to the user, who at that point will have to access the site only once to finalize the booking. There is also a Do Not Disturb feature, to prevent bot messages from arriving at night. ”
The data is saved in accordance with the European privacy regulation. The bot uses them only to access the site and they are deleted immediately when the user decides to deactivate it. The data is also not associated with the phone number, which the bot never reads, but with the unique user code assigned by Telegram. “Serenissimo is an open source project, born in the name of privacy and free sharing, without any profit – adds Granzotto – The source code it’s available on my GitHub account, open to anyone who wants to see or use it “.
After an initial test phase, the users of the bot began to grow. “My mother was my first beta tester, and she surprised me: she downloaded Telegram and started Serenissimo without any particular information. I then extended the test to the parents of some friends, collecting the first feedback. Users started growing after some local newspaper coverage. About two months after its launch, the people who activated the bot are just under 3000, of which about 1200 are still active. More than 1000 have already booked the vaccine or received a first dose, including my mother. It’s much more than I expected. ”
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In particular, Granzotto is surprised by public response of users over 70, who found the use of the chatbot simple and immediate. “I have received many positive comments from people of a certain age who have managed to book the vaccine with the help of Serenissimo. satisfaction the greatest was to see how a simple technology like that of a bot, developed mostly in my spare time, can help someone in a concrete and immediate way “.
Serenissimo remains an independent project, managed solely by Granzotto. “From the Veneto Region, after some insistence, they put me in touch with the managers of the booking site. We had a constructive exchange, and I assured them that the bot is programmed to avoid system overloads. On the contrary, it avoids many people pouring into the site at the same time, scheduling visits on an hourly basis. All this could be made more efficient with an official API of the site, perhaps to also integrate a signaling function via SMS or via WhatsApp “.
For now, the Granzotto bot works only for reservations at the ULSS in Veneto, but the idea could also work in other parts of Italy. “Each region has developed its own system and I have not checked them all due to lack of time. However, I believe that in many cases a few changes are enough to make the Serenissimo code compatible with the functioning of the various regional sites. I would be very happy if someone wanted to clone and readjust Serenissimo to make him speak in Romagna, Puglia or Sicilian. “
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