The COVID-19 Messenger Bot from Taiwan

Inspiration

Over the past few months, COVID-19 was spreading rapidly. Not only companies but people were also facing challenges from COVID-19. Hence, GoSky dedicated to provide COVID-19 Chatbot to help out people in need. Let the information of COVID-19 epidemic be delivered in a fast and correct way.

What it does

GoSky AI uses Chatbot technology to integrate global epidemic situation information, and understand global situation immediately through simple operation on COVID-19 Chatbot! In addition to letting the public know the latest news during the epidemic prevention period, we also provide relevant measures and popularize epidemic prevention knowledge.

Here are five major functions in COVID-19 Chatbot to keep people up to date during epidemic prevention.

Mask inventory query

According to your location, the chatbot will find the nearest pharmacy, and it will open the map so that you can contact the pharmacy and check the current mask inventory status.
Knowledge of on COVID-19 response and preparedness

Provide knowledge about medical masks including “how to wear a mask correctly”, “how to deal with the mask after you took it off ” and tell the users how to wear the masks correctly. The wrong way of wearing can actually cause infection, so we provided this function to educate the public.
Outbreak data of various countries

Updated latest data of various counties via integrated the number of confirmed diagnoses provided by relevant epidemic prevention units from the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And the "Global Number of Confirmed Cases", "Global Total Deaths" and "Global Total Rehabilitation Data" counted by the CSSE System Science and Engineering Center of Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins University) to grasp the epidemic trend in real-time.
COVID-19 latest news

Provides Google search engine real-time “COVID-19” search results, including Wikipedia, BBC News, China Eastern Satellite TV, and the latest news from major domestic news channels.
Epidemic Consultation and Notification Line

It has a built-in "one-click notification" epidemic prevention button. If you have any epidemiological consultation questions and emergencies, you can immediately call the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control.

How I built it

We use Chatfuel as our chatbot platform and integrate with mask searching API、COVID-19 Global cases API by using Node.js on Google Cloud Function.

Challenges I ran into

The noted function” Mask inventory query” in COVID-19 Chatbot needs amount of information about mask location, exact quantity...etc, however, the government didn’t release enough information at the beginning, so it’s one of the challenges we ran into. Meanwhile, since there is an amount of unorganized data collected from different channels, how to integrate and organize data and make chatbot’s user-experience more friendly is the biggest challenge that we face.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

COVID-19 Chatbot has been highlighted by 14 news in Taiwan. Taiwan is only 80 miles(126km) away from China. Until 03/28 is only 252 confirmed cases, 2 deaths. We are proud to say the information from this chatbot helped people noticed the importance of epidemic prevention in the early outbreak from Jan 27th, 2020.

What I learned

We attract people with different kinds of needs and guide them to the correct information they need. Unfortunately, we can’t meet all the needs with our current functions, plus, people often ask questions in COVID-19 Chatbot when they can’t get answers, we are working on new functions based on these feedbacks.

What's next for COVID-19 Chatbot

GoSky will keep up effort by extension functions in COVID-19 Chatbot, such as airline information, plan work from home, corporate with the public sector…etc.

Meanwhile, GoSky will be responding to the "Chatbot Corona Help Program initiated by developers worldwide." GoSky wants to help the public sector, NGOs, and companies affected by the outbreak. We will create chatbots for companies, public departments, and NGOs struggling with the COVID-19 outbreak, building free chatbots to solve the problem affected by COVID-19. (Public sector and NGO are preferred)