Inspiration
I grew up in California – the land of earthquakes and wildfires. Just last week, my sister had to evacuate her home because of the wildfires terrorizing the population.
Times like those are scary and sometimes the police may be too busy to help every single caller. Instead of being placed in a queue where the person may begin to freak out, we had devised an application that aims to provide information and emotional assistance during times of major distress.
With advances in virtual assistant technologies, interpersonal communications with virtual assistants is a growing trend in the technological world. Our approach to the challenges with Natural Disasters and Relief was to address a technical solution to a more human and emotional concern for victims of disasters.
What it does
Watson Crisis Hotline talks to a caller who may be in distress and attempts to calm them down, with emotional responses and informational ones. It can also help people know what to do after a natural disaster – like who to contact for insurance reasons or what to do if you just lost your home.
In the case of a real emergency, Watson Crisis Hotline also collects users' locations and can figure out if many callers are calling about a similar crisis in multiple areas and what the general radius of this emergency may be.
How we built it
We built this product using IBM's Voice Agent with Watson, Twilio, Node.JS, and Google Cloud Platform. The User calls the Twilio service, which has a SIP trunk connecting to our IBM Watson Assistant. The Assistant communicates with the user as an operator, and uses our training to respond to the user.
Challenges we ran into
Getting used to all these new technologies was a difficult endeavor and required a lot of research and question-asking. Learning all of the tools that IBM Cloud offers to achieve our solution was a daunting task, but we discovered that many of the technical aspects of our solution exist as components in the IBM Cloud platform.
Additionally, addressing the emotional need is a challenge, as the expertise needed in creating a full solution is beyond the scope of what we are able to achieve in a hackathon.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Getting the call to talk to Watson and having it also communicate with a Node.JS server for location tracking.
What we learned
We learned how to use IBM's Voice Agent and it's associated libraries. We also learned how to use Twilio for voice/SMS generation and response. We also learned how to train IBM Watson assistant to suit our use case.
What's next for Watson Relief Hotline
Further improvements to the Watson Assistant's skills could be made to further improve the emotional responses and consoling.
To improve the accuracy and generation of emergency location tracking. Also add emergency information to our Watson Agent.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.