AI phone assistant for municipalities
Iris by OpenIris is an AI phone assistant for municipalities, made by a Dutch company based in Amsterdam. The Municipality of Doesburg has used Iris at its customer contact centre since July 2026, where she answers the phone around the clock in 32 languages. Iris is built for the GDPR, sovereign and independent of US big tech.
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What is an AI phone assistant?
An AI phone assistant answers the phone and holds a conversation in everyday speech. Residents call the number they already know. Iris understands the question, finds the answer in the municipality's own information and explains it in plain language. When a question needs a person, she transfers the call. You will also see the words voicebot and voice assistant for the same thing.
What does Iris do for the customer contact centre?
- She answers on the municipality's existing phone number, 24 hours a day.
- She recognises the caller's language and continues in it.
- Her answers come from the municipality's own documentation, websites and processes.
- During office hours she transfers calls that need a person to the right department.
- The municipality gets an anonymised Dutch summary of every call in its dashboard.
Why is Iris sovereign?
OpenIris is a Dutch company. We offer the models through APIs within Europe, or fully sovereign as open source on our own GPUs. That covers the whole chain: speech recognition, language model and voice. There is no Microsoft, Google, Amazon or OpenAI anywhere in it. Our servers are in the EU, in Germany, and the GPUs that run the open-source models are in France and Poland.
How does Iris handle the GDPR?
Names, phone numbers, citizen service numbers and bank account numbers are filtered out of the transcript before it is stored or sent to a language model. Conversations with residents are never used to train models. The municipality is the data controller and OpenIris the processor, under a data processing agreement. We also help with the DPIA and the entry in the Dutch Algorithm Register.
Where is Iris live, and who does OpenIris work with?
Since July 2026 Iris has answered the phone for the customer contact centre of the Municipality of Doesburg.
Through Startup in Residence Intergov, OpenIris also builds the Memory Box, an interviewer that records what experienced staff know. We build it with a challenge team from the Municipality of The Hague, the Province of South Holland and the Netherlands Forensic Institute; the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security joined the assignment. The phone assistant runs at Doesburg. Other partners are Startup Village Amsterdam, Interpactum and SamenVijf.
What municipalities often ask us.
What does an AI phone assistant cost a municipality?
That depends on how the municipality uses Iris. After an introduction you receive a proposal. E-mail info@openiris.nl to schedule a demo.
Does Iris replace contact centre staff?
No. Iris answers the questions that come up again and again and transfers the call when a person is needed, which leaves the team more time for complex cases.
Does Iris call residents?
No. Iris only answers incoming calls and never calls residents herself.
See Iris at work for your municipality?
E-mail us and we schedule a demo. We set Iris up on your own information; no IT project or app is needed.
E-mail info@openiris.nl