IBM is helping government agencies, healthcare organizations and academic institutions throughout the world use AI to put trusted data and information into the hands of their citizens. With a flood of information requests from citizens, wait times in many areas to receive answers can exceed two hours. Available for no charge for at least 90 days and available to our client’s citizens online, IBM Watson Assistant for Citizens on the IBM public cloud, brings together Watson Assistant, Natural Language Processing capabilities from IBM Research, and state-of-art enterprise AI search capabilities with Watson Discovery, to understand and respond to common questions about COVID-19.
BM is offering Watson Assistant for Citizens for no charge for at least 90 days and will assist with initial set up, which can typically be done in a few days. The initial solution is available in English and is being tailored to include Indian languages as well such as Hindi, so you can ask questions such as “कोरोना के लक्षण क्या है”, or “गाजियाबाद में इसका कितना संक्रमण है?”, and “क्या मास्क कोरोना से बचा सकता है” . The offer includes access to 15 pre-trained COVID-19 “intents” or queries. “Intents” are purposes or goals that are expressed in a customer’s input, such as answering a question. By recognizing the intent expressed in a customer’s input, the Watson Assistant service can choose the correct dialog flow for responding to it.
“In just the last three months, the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has altered nearly every aspect of our personal and professional lives. As a trusted technology leader, running the most critical systems in the world, IBM is committed to marshaling the company’s resources to help clients, governments, health agencies and academic institutions, monitor and manage the outbreak through various initiatives. In these challenging times, its critical to offer accurate information to all constituents and hence a clear opportunity to apply AI to quickly answer common questions at a very large scale. IBM developed the Watson Assistant for Citizens to provide an AI-powered virtual agent that helps governments deliver accurate information to their citizens without overwhelming contact centers where human agents are needed to help those who truly need them. To introduce this offering in India, IBM Research has trained Watson Assistant to answer queries in English and Hindi to enable various Government agencies and Departments to offer this service to its constituents. ” – Gargi Dasgupta, Director – IBM Research India and CTO IBM India /South Asia.
