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. 2021 Sep 21;23(9):e27283.
doi: 10.2196/27283.

Chloe for COVID-19: Evolution of an Intelligent Conversational Agent to Address Infodemic Management Needs During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Sophia Siedlikowski  1 , Louis-Philippe Noël  1 , Stephanie Anne Moynihan  1 , Marc Robin  1
Affiliations

Chloe for COVID-19: Evolution of an Intelligent Conversational Agent to Address Infodemic Management Needs During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Sophia Siedlikowski et al. J Med Internet Res. .

Abstract

There is an unprecedented demand for infodemic management due to rapidly evolving information about the novel COVID-19 pandemic. This viewpoint paper details the evolution of a Canadian digital information tool, Chloe for COVID-19, based on incremental leveraging of artificial intelligence techniques. By providing an accessible summary of Chloe's development, we show how proactive cooperation between health, technology, and corporate sectors can lead to a rapidly scalable, safe, and secure virtual chatbot to assist public health efforts in keeping Canadians informed. We then highlight Chloe's strengths, the challenges we faced during the development process, and future directions for the role of chatbots in infodemic management. The information presented here may guide future collaborative efforts in health technology in order to enhance access to accurate and timely health information to the public.

Keywords: COVID-19; artificial intelligence; chatbot; conversational agents; digital health; infodemic; infodemiology; misinformation; public health; virtual care.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: All four authors of this paper work at Dialogue Health Technologies Inc. but do not have any personal financial interests related to the contents of this paper.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Example of self-assessment flow for a user in Quebec.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Representation of questions in a multidimensional space.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Diagram of the final question & answer (Q&A) model architecture using the example of a question about the symptoms of COVID-19. BERT: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers; FAQ: frequently asked question; OOD: out-of-distribution.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Example of test navigation results for a user in Quebec.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Chloe’s welcome message to users explaining their options.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Display of Chloe’s features available to users.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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