Josh Hendrickson
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, it’s essential to get reliable and easy-to-understand information about the virus. But, knowing where to go and how to read that information is difficult. Project COVID aims to solve those problems. It’s a conversational A.I. that pulls in data from the CDC, WHO, and NIH and answers questions in everyday English.
The A.I. tool comes from a company called Avaamo. While Avaamo might not be a household name, you may have used one of its products. The company helps design and build conversational chatbots for hospitals, retail stores, and other industries. When you browse a site with an Avaamo bot, it pops up like a chat window and you can ask questions it will answer.
Avaamo took the same approach with Project COVID. It’s a conversational chatbot that pulls information from the CDC, WHO, NIH, and some other sources. You can ask a question like, “How many people have recovered from the coronavirus,” and it will pull up the latest data and give you a short answer.
The tool is free to use, and Avaamo specified that governments and businesses alike may embed it on websites for free. It’s also mobile-friendly and will work from most smartphone browsers.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that it isn’t perfect, however. We tripped up the chatbot by typing: “Is Covid-19 like the flu?” That led to an unhelpful answer about coronavirus tracking. However, when we typed “Is coronavirus like the flu?” the answer it gave was accurate and helpful.
And of course, a chatbot isn’t a substitute for a doctor. So you shouldn’t solely rely on it for your medical advice. But, if you’ve tried to educate yourself about COVID-19 and found resources like the CDC hard to get through, Project COVID might help.
You can access the chatbot a the Project COVID site right now.
Source: Project COVID
