This article was published on May 22, 2020

This free AI chatbot helps businesses fight COVID-19 misinformation

A virtual assistant for the pandemic era


This free AI chatbot helps businesses fight COVID-19 misinformation Image by: Pixabay

Avaamo, a company that specializes in conversational AI, recently built a virtual assistant to translate natural language queries about the COVID-19 pandemic into reliable insights. In other words, it’s an AI-powered chatbot that can answer just about any question you have about the pandemic.

Credit: Avaamo

Avaamo’s Project COVID uses a deep learning system called natural language processing to turn our questions about the pandemic into website and database queries. It works a lot like Google or Bing, you input text and the AI tries to find the most relevant information possible. The big difference is that Avaamo carefully guards the gates against misinformation by only surfacing results from reputable websites such as CDC, NIH, WHO, and Johns Hopkins.

Best of all, there’s no cost for businesses to use the tool. Per a press release from Avaamo:

Project COVID is also available free of cost to be embedded on the website of care management providers, health care organizations, businesses, or government agencies, which are facing a mounting number of questions, support calls and community requests for information on the COVID-19 outbreak and responses to it. The utility is free, and is designed to quickly and easily embed into any existing website in just a few minutes.

Quick take: This is really cool. The information is valid, the company’s recently updated the system, and it doesn’t appear that any business that wishes to implement Project COVID on their own sites will have to jump through hoops to get it installed.

Having a simple, non-medical (Avaamo is careful to point out that this is not a substitute for professional medical advice) solution to providing solid information to common COVID-19 questions is a big deal. We’ve moved past static FAQs because the pandemic is an ever-changing situation. This represents a great way to keep clients, patients, and customers up-to-date without having to reinvent the wheel to do it.

For information check out Avaamo’s website.

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