FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT
Carolina Camarena, Director of Communications, City Manager's Office
408-535-7777;
Carolina.Camarena@sanjoseca.gov
SAN JOSE, Calif. (March 10, 2021) – Tomorrow, March 11, marks the second annual National 311 Day, and it is being celebrated with a series of new language accessibility and user experience enhancements to the City’s SJ311 omnichannel network. These improvements include:
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The web portal experience is now available in Spanish and Vietnamese.
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Machine learning — artificial intelligence that learns and improves over time — language translation capabilities enable staff to respond to service requests in the resident’s preferred language.
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The integration of San José residential garbage and recycling services such as Junk Pickup, the ability to swap out your garbage or recycling container, reporting a missed pickup, and start a new service.
Last year, the cities of San José, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Oakland; the County of Santa Clara; and Google established the National 3-1-1 Day to celebrate non-emergency call takers with the unveiling of the new and improved SJ311 omnichannel network.
“Because of the technical help from Google.org’s passionate and dedicated team, San José’s one million residents benefit from faster emergency response and better government services,” said Mayor Sam Liccardo.
SJ311 manages 30,000 additional calls that were previously routed to Police Communications non-emergency phone system, directing both City service calls and Police non-emergency calls to the appropriate resources for a more efficient calling experience. SJ311 now consists of a call center, a virtual agent, a chatbot, a web portal, a mobile app, and online forms.
"As a diverse City where 57% of San José residents speak a language other than English at home with Spanish and Vietnamese being the most common, and 14% of San José residents over the age of 18 reporting that they speak English “not well” or “not at all” - it is important that we continuously improve how we provide effective and equitable access to City services,” said Jerry Driessen, Assistant Chief Information Officer for the City.
“We are so grateful to call-takers and were excited to be able to work with San José to modernize their 311 omnichannel network and improve the customer service experience for residents,” said Javier Gonzalez, Google’s Head of California Local Government Affairs and Public Policy.
Learn more about the
City’s collaboration with Google.org on reimagining SJ311.
About the City of San José
With more than one million residents, San José is one of the most diverse cities in the United States and is Northern California’s largest city and the 10th largest city in the nation. San José’s transformation into a global innovation center has resulted in one of the largest concentrations of technology companies and skilled residents in the world. In 2016, the City adopted the San José Smart City Vision, a series of goals to build towards greater needs for sustainability, inclusivity, customer friendliness, safety, and better services through transformative technologies.
About Google.org
Google.org, Google’s philanthropy, brings the best of Google to help solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges combining funding, innovation, and technical expertise to support underserved communities and provide opportunity for everyone. We engage nonprofits and social enterprises who make a significant impact on the communities they represent, and whose work has the potential to produce meaningful change. We want a better world, faster — and we believe in leveraging technology and applying scalable data-driven innovation to move the needle.
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