Leveraging Conversational Technology to Answer Common COVID-19 Questions

The rapidly evolving science about the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic created unprecedented health information needs and dramatic changes in policies globally We describe a platform, Watson AssistantTM (WA), which has been used to develop conversational agents to deliver COVID-19 related information We characterized the diverse use cases and implementations during the early pandemic and measured adoption through number of users, messages sent, and conversational turns (i e , pairs of interactions between users and agents) Thirty-seven institutions in nine countries deployed COVID-19 conversational agents with WA between March 30 and August 10, 2020, including 24 governmental agencies, seven employers, five provider organizations, and one health plan Over 6 8 million messages were delivered through the platform The mean number of conversational turns per session ranged between 1 9 and 3 5 Our experience demonstrates that conversational technologies can be rapidly deployed for pandemic response and are adopted globally by a wide range of users