Nia — AI Chatbot for BCP Council

Nia is an AI chatbot for BCP Council's Online Family Hub. It helps residents in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole find family services information without digging through pages of content.

The interface of Nia on the Online Family Hub website

The problem

The Family Information Directory holds a huge amount of content across many services. It's thorough, but that made it hard for residents to find the right answer quickly — many didn't know the right terminology, weren't familiar with how services were structured, or simply wanted a direct answer rather than a page to search through.

Nia started as a proof of concept, built with a third-party chatbot framework. It proved that a conversational approach worked, but we had little control over the interface or interaction design, couldn't easily improve accessibility, and couldn't reuse it for anything beyond the Family Hub. Iterating within that framework would have meant working around its limits rather than solving them, so we chose to rebuild it ourselves.

Designing for clarity and accessibility

The rebuild followed the GOV.UK Design System, adapted for an embedded conversational interface. That meant standardising the message structure, defining clear states for loading and responses, and designing mobile-first so the experience holds up on any device.

Examples of the button variants used in the Nia interface

Accessibility was built in rather than fixed afterwards — consistent colour contrast, full keyboard navigation, clear focus states, and screen reader support, alongside a simpler visual layout that reduces cognitive load for anyone using it.

Built to be reused

Rather than a one-off chatbot, Nia was architected as a reusable capability: a component library, an embed-first deployment model that doesn't depend on the web team's release schedule, and config-driven behaviour that separates content from interface.

Examples of the chat bubbles used to distinguish between user and system messages

It's built on Next.js with the Vercel AI SDK for chat handling, and Azure AI Search for retrieving content directly from the Family Hub — keeping a single source of truth rather than duplicating content into the chatbot.

Outcome

Nia now runs as a managed, in-house solution that works across devices and is accessible to everyone. Because it's built as a reusable codebase, we can adapt the prompts and underlying data to launch it on other council websites without starting from scratch each time.