Foreword
About a year ago, I decided to write a chatbot that answers frequently asked questions about COVID-19. At that moment, it seemed to many that my idea was nothing more than a hype, which after a short period of time would go out. However, it turned out that a year later, this topic is only gaining momentum. In this article, I will talk about how we created a chatbot for consultation on COVID-19 at the request of the German Interior Ministry (BMI) , and also express the idea of creating a similar project in Russia.
Why is this chatbot needed?
Throughout the pandemic (and now), information sources provide a large amount of heterogeneous statistics on diseases, deaths, course of the disease, symptoms, etc. Moreover, in personal communication, people often (and unconsciously) can distort their own or someone else's experience on how to act if you or your loved ones are sick, how to interpret statistics, is it worth getting vaccinated, and in general, what does all this mean? Of course, there is probably a single centralized source (s) of accurate information, but finding and identifying them is not always easy, and if we are talking about statistical data, then the situation is even more complicated.
In this regard, there is a need for the existence of a single and easy-to-use source of information. It would seem, why, for example, the hotline is not such a source? In my personal experience (and I flew abroad several times during the pandemic, and also faced the virus face to face), the quality of the hotline services in my city, to put it mildly, is not always excellent. Long waiting times, inconsistent information, etc. Therefore, a virtual assistant or chatbot, call it what you want, is a more than worthy alternative and an excellent solution to the problems of the unity of information and the complexity of access to it.
German Interior Ministry case
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