Google Launch AI Chatbot for COVID-19 Info

The Rapid Response Virtual Agent program includes open source templates for companies to add coronavirus content to their own chatbots.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are continuing to take a front-row seat in fighting COVID-19, with Google Cloud launching an AI chatbot on Wednesday. The chatbot, which it calls the Rapid Response Virtual Agent program, will provide information to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, as announced in a Google blog.

The program will Google Cloud customers to respond more quickly to questions from their own customers about the coronavirus. It's designed for organizations who need to be able to provide information related to the COVID-19 pandemic to their customers, such as government agencies, healthcare and public health organizations, as well as travel, financial services and retail industries.

Google also offers Contact Center AI for 24/7 self-service support on COVID-19 questions via a chatbot or over the phone. Google also allows for businesses to add COVID-19 content to their own virtual agents with the ability to integrate open-source templates from organizations that have already launched similar initiatives. For instance, Verily partnered with Google Cloud to launch the Pathfinder virtual agent template for health systems and hospitals. It enables customers to create chat or voice bots that answer questions about COVID-19 symptoms and provide guidance from public health authorities such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and World Health Organization (WHO), according to the Google blog.

The Contact Center AI's Rapid Response Virtual Agent program is available in any of the 23 languages supported by Dialogflow.

Google has provided a template to rapidly create a Dialogflow agent: You can find the template here. There is also documentation on how to build and deploy a virtual agent, whether voice or chat.

We've been looking in more detail at this template and created our own chatbot. This is a work in progress and will be something which we are updating and improving daily. You can interact with this chatbot in the bottom right of this page.