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 Assistant (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 a number of users, messages sent, and conversational turns (ie, pairs of interactions between users and agents). Thirty-seven institutions in 9 countries deployed COVID-19 conversational agents with WA between March 30 and August 10, 2020, including 24 governmental agencies, 7 employers, 5 provider organizations, and 1 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.