Intelligent Chatbot
Give residents instant, accurate answers about your planning consultation — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without any project manager involvement. ConsultOnline’s intelligent chatbot is trained on your consultation’s own documents, FAQs, and pages, so it answers questions with source citations and directs people to the right information. No other consultation platform offers this.
24/7 Availability
Residents do not check planning documents during office hours. They look at evenings and weekends, when your team is unavailable. The chatbot answers questions any time of day or night, ensuring no one is left waiting for a response. Every question gets an immediate, helpful answer — whether it is midnight on a Tuesday or Sunday morning.
Source Citations Included
Every answer the chatbot provides includes citations linking back to the specific documents, pages, or FAQ entries it drew from. Residents can verify the information themselves and explore the source material in full. This transparency builds trust and ensures the chatbot is a gateway to your consultation content, not a replacement for it.
Reduced Support Volume
The majority of questions residents ask about consultations are factual — deadlines, locations, what is being proposed, how to respond. The chatbot handles these routine enquiries automatically, freeing your team to focus on complex stakeholder engagement, report writing, and project management rather than answering the same questions repeatedly.
The Information Gap
Why residents need instant answers about planning consultations
Planning consultations generate large volumes of technical documentation — design and access statements, environmental assessments, transport studies, masterplans, and policy documents that can run to hundreds of pages. Most residents do not have the time or expertise to read everything. They want to know specific things: will this affect my street, when is the deadline, how tall are the buildings, where do I submit my views. Yet finding those answers often means downloading PDFs, searching through appendices, or waiting for the consultation team to reply to an email. The result is that many people disengage before they ever find what they need.
An intelligent chatbot trained on the consultation’s own content changes this dynamic entirely. Instead of navigating complex document libraries, residents simply ask their question in plain language and receive a clear, accurate answer drawn directly from the consultation materials. Every response includes citations linking to the source documents, so residents can verify the information and read further if they choose. The chatbot does not invent answers or speculate — it works only with the content your team has published, and if it cannot find a relevant answer, it directs the resident to contact your team directly.
This is not just a convenience feature. Accessibility guidance and best practice in community engagement both emphasise the importance of making information easy to find and understand. A chatbot that can explain a transport assessment in plain English, point someone to the relevant section of a design guide, or confirm a consultation deadline is a genuine step toward more inclusive, more accessible public participation.
How It Works
From documents to answers in three steps
Upload Your Content
Add your consultation documents, FAQ answers, and microsite page content. The chatbot automatically processes and indexes everything — PDFs, Word documents, web pages, and structured FAQs. It understands the full context of your consultation so it can draw on any published material when answering questions.
Embed on Your Microsite
The chatbot appears as an accessible widget on your consultation microsite, ready for residents to use. It sits alongside your existing content — surveys, maps, documents, and event listings — giving visitors an additional way to find the information they need without navigating away from the page.
Residents Ask, It Answers
Residents type their questions in plain language and receive clear, cited answers immediately. The chatbot draws only from your published consultation content, cites its sources, and links to relevant documents. If it cannot answer a question, it provides your team’s contact details so the resident can follow up directly.
Use Cases
Intelligent support across every consultation scenario
From answering routine questions to surfacing hard-to-find details in technical documents, the chatbot supports residents and project managers alike.
Routine Resident Questions
“When does the consultation close?” “How do I submit my response?” “What is being proposed for the site on High Street?” These are the questions your team answers dozens of times per consultation. The chatbot handles them instantly with accurate, sourced answers, freeing your team from repetitive email responses.
Navigating Technical Documents
Residents should not need to read a 200-page environmental assessment to find out about flood risk on their street. The chatbot can surface specific details from technical documents and explain them in plain language, with a citation linking to the exact source so residents can read the full context if they wish.
Multilingual Support
The chatbot can understand and respond to questions in multiple languages, making your consultation more accessible to residents whose first language is not English. This removes a significant barrier to participation that traditional consultation approaches struggle to address without dedicated translation budgets.
Admin Dashboard Assistant
The chatbot is not just for residents. It also appears in the admin dashboard, where project managers can use it to quickly find information across their consultation content. Need to check what the transport assessment says about junction capacity? Ask the assistant instead of searching through files manually.
Conversation Insights
Every chatbot conversation is logged and available for review. See what residents are asking about most frequently, identify gaps in your published content, and understand which topics generate the most confusion. These insights help you improve your consultation materials and anticipate community concerns before they escalate.
Graceful Escalation
When the chatbot cannot find a suitable answer in your consultation content, it does not guess or fabricate information. Instead, it clearly tells the resident that it cannot answer that particular question and provides your team’s contact details so they can follow up directly. This ensures residents always have a path to getting the help they need.
See the intelligent chatbot in action
Book a short demo and we will show you how the chatbot answers real resident questions using your consultation content — with source citations, graceful escalation, and conversation logging.
Capabilities
Intelligent assistance built for consultations
Everything the chatbot can do, from answering resident questions on your microsite to giving your project managers a faster way to search consultation content.
Feature Deep Dive
Chatbot features in detail
A closer look at how the intelligent chatbot works and what makes it well suited to public planning consultations.
Content Training
The chatbot is trained exclusively on the content you publish for each consultation. Upload PDFs, Word documents, or point it at your microsite pages and FAQ entries. The system processes and indexes this content so the chatbot can draw on it when answering questions. When you update your documents, the chatbot’s knowledge updates too — no manual retraining required.
Source Citations
Every answer includes clickable citations that link directly to the source document or page. If the chatbot draws on a transport assessment to answer a question about traffic, the resident sees a link to that specific document. This ensures transparency, builds trust, and encourages residents to engage more deeply with your consultation materials.
Graceful Escalation
The chatbot is designed to acknowledge its limits. If a question falls outside the published consultation content — opinions on whether the scheme is a good idea, for example — it clearly explains that it cannot answer and provides your team’s contact details. This honest approach prevents misinformation and ensures residents always have a route to human support.
Conversation Logging
Every conversation is recorded and available in your admin dashboard. Browse individual conversations, search by topic or keyword, and review how the chatbot handled specific questions. Conversation logs provide a rich source of qualitative insight into what your community cares about — complementing the quantitative data from surveys and response forms.
Topic Insights
The dashboard surfaces the most frequently asked topics, questions the chatbot could not answer, and emerging themes across conversations. Use these insights to identify content gaps on your microsite, update your FAQ, and understand which aspects of the consultation are generating the most community interest or concern — before those concerns appear in formal responses.
Admin Dashboard Assistant
The same intelligent assistant is available within the admin dashboard for your project managers. Need to quickly check what the design guide says about building heights, or find the relevant section of the environmental statement? Ask the assistant instead of manually searching through uploaded documents. It is a productivity tool for your team as well as a public-facing feature.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Ready to give your residents 24/7 consultation support?
Stop answering the same questions by email and phone. ConsultOnline’s intelligent chatbot gives residents instant, cited answers from your own consultation content — day and night, without any project manager involvement. No other consultation platform offers this.
More features to discover