Combating Pandemic Misinformation: How Watson Teams Are Helping Citizens in Crisis
Disclaimer: The following story is personal. The views expressed within are entirely my own and may not represent the views of IBM.
What a year 2020 has been. I would venture to guess that like me, most of you didn’t have the faintest inkling of what was to come when bidding farewell to 2019 nearly a year ago. I know I certainly did not expect a global pandemic to come along and up-end life as we know it for years to come.
The impact of Covid-19 on society has been nothing short of destructive on seemingly all fronts. As the weeks have ticked by and the pandemic stretched onward, misinformation and rumors have run unchecked— taking on new life and consuming the imaginations of anxious and frightened people around the world.
As this crisis has evolved, designers and technical teams have mobilized; leveraging their expertise to help communities around the world to protect themselves. Our team at IBM Watson was no different. We sought to solve a critical problem: how can we collect accurate and trustworthy information related to Covid-19 and help organizations get that information into the hands of real people? In March members of several Watson product teams began collaborating to solve this problem. Ultimately we aligned on the creation of a free offering that would act as a source of trustworthy pandemic information and combine the information retrieval power of Watson Discovery with the conversational experience of Watson Assistant.
Members of the Watson Discovery team set to work collecting data to support the project. This data was sourced from trusted authorities on the subject such as the CDC, Harvard, and the United States Department of Labor. With the data collected, it was transformed into the Watson Discovery Covid-19 kit which would be used to power a dynamic chatbot experience. With the Covid-19 data kit ready to be deployed, the Watson Assistant team began working to pre-train intents and entities related to Covid-19 to teach the assistant to handle these new conversations. The last remaining area to address was the end-user experience.
To bring this project to life, we needed a robust and user-friendly UI to deliver this vital information. The obvious choice for the team was to leverage Watson Assistant’s web chat integration.
Web chat was designed with the needs of users at its forefront. The web chat is an end-user chat application that offers easy setup and UI customization, simple embedding onto any website experience, and natural conversational chat experiences. Its UI customization allows the interface to be imbued with client branding, giving users confidence that the web chat interface is native to the organization and is not a malicious 3rd party entity. Users can begin a conversation by selecting an animated launcher on the host website that invites the user to ask a question. When launched, the user is greeted by the digital assistant who introduces itself as a virtual entity and not a real person (a best practice and key ethical consideration). The assistant also suggests topics to help the user understand what sort of subjects they can discuss.
Once in a conversation, the web chat experience guides users through complex conversational flows (like Covid-19 self-assessments), helping users to check for symptoms while also providing clarity around personal risk factors. The assistant can also respond to questions with articles, allowing the user to link off to read further about topics like local safety guidelines. When all else fails, the assistant can even facilitate a connection to a human agent when the user’s questions have not been answered. These conversational patterns, response types, and escalations are the result of years of research with our users and loops of design iteration to create usable and user-centered conversational design patterns.
Watson Assistant and the Watson Discovery Covid-19 data kit proved to be a perfect match. These two solutions were packaged together and launched as Watson Assistant for Citizens. The offering is free for 60 days and built to deliver fast and accurate answers from the Discovery Covid-19 kit via Watson Assistant and its web chat integration. Built to help organizations cope with the pandemic, the offering also included free services to help customers identify their core use cases, setup and customize the web chat, and utilize Assistant’s pre-built Covid-19 intents.
In the nine months since Watson Assistant for Citizens was announced, it’s been deployed in over 25 countries and has expanded its breadth of use cases from health and safety information to information about business reopening protocols, unemployment benefits, and even urgent election information.
We may not be doctors, first responders, or essential workers, but our work has had a very real and meaningful impact during this crisis. The product we designed is responsible for helping thousands of people around the world find trustworthy answers in a time where bad information can be deadly. In this way we are doing our part and fulfilling an essential role in combating misinformation, using our unique expertise as product designers.
To learn more about Watson Assistant for Citizens, visit: https://www.ibm.com/watson/covid-response
