The National Health Mission, Department of Health,Medical and Family Welfare, Government of Andhra Pradesh, in association with IBM has
created a virtual agent to share information related to COVID-19 response efforts
The National Health Mission, under the
Government of Andhra Pradesh, and IBM announced today that a virtual
agent that provides COVID-19-related information for citizens on the
response efforts and measures by the Andhra Pradesh Government has been
launched at the Andhra Pradesh National Health Mission portal of
Department of Health, Medical and Family Welfare –
http://covid19.ap.gov.in/covid19/ [1] – a website under the auspices of
the Andhra Pradesh Government.
The Watson virtual agent (called 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 in English, Telugu and Hindi.
_ _
Shri Bhaskar Kattamneni, Mission Director, National Health Mission and
Commissioner of Health, Medical & Family Welfare Department, Andhra
Pradesh said, “IBM has been a trusted partner to the Government of
Andhra Pradesh for a long period of time in enabling better delivery of
citizen services. I appreciate the collaborative efforts of IBM in
disseminating meaningful information to citizens of Andhra Pradesh in
this pandemic situation. While the government is putting all resources
available at its disposal to use, efforts like these go a long way in
helping citizens meet their information needs. I also appreciate the
quick turnaround time of the IBM team to include Telugu, the official
language of state, into the Watson virtual agent.”
_ _
Commenting on the announcement, Sandip Patel, General Manager, IBM
India/South Asia said, “In these unprecedented times, access to
accurate information plays a critical role in allaying fears, dispelling
myths and building trust among citizens. We are honoured to collaborate
with the Government of Andhra Pradesh and to contribute to the prompt
measures they have taken to provide their citizens with easy access to
relevant information from reliable sources in local language. IBM is the
innovation partner to businesses, governments and citizens across the
world, and is committed to marshalling its resources, technology and
expertise towards initiatives that help to manage COVID-19 outbreak.”
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the police helplines and
call centers of other relevant bodies have received a large number of
calls from citizens asking to be informed on matters relating to
COVID-19. In order to reach as many citizens as possible and meet their
information needs, the National Health Mission, under the Government of
Andhra Pradesh has collaborated with IBM to set up a Watson – based
virtual agent that has been designed and trained to understand natural
language and interact with users.
Based on the information provided by all the relevant ministries of the
Central Government and the Andhra Pradesh Government for the prevention
& treatment related guidance, citizen welfare schemes and consolidated
at the main portal of the Department of Health, Medical and Family
Welfare, Andhra Pradesh. The virtual agent can answer citizens’
questions, asking for clarification or redirecting the user to specific
information on the portal or to other websites of related ministries and
official bodies. The virtual agent is deployed in a web browser and it
is built in a way that it safeguards the privacy of the users.
The objective of this type of advanced technologies (chatbots or virtual
agents) is to help reduce the waiting times for calls that users make to
the telephone lines of state services relating to the novel coronavirus
with an aim to best serve them.
To access the AP Government Citizen Chat Assistant visit:
http://covid19.ap.gov.in/covid19/
