I volunteer for Activity 2, with the caveat that I am most focused locally because I think that I will make the most difference at the moment in my specific context. What we are seeing here is that the highly educated population that speak English and are plugged into the European context are responding responsibly, while the lower-income and education bracket that do not read media in English is not.
I’m directly involved in one particular project. In my community, people have started to look to me for recent information, since I have spent a lot of time reading journals and keeping up with the government response and the recommendations of authorities in Sweden and internationally.
A group of people, the leader of whom used to work for Furhat Robotics before he started Narratory, are developing a chatbot that we help might alleviate some of the pressure on the national hotline phone numbers, which people are calling to get information in speech that is already available online. It’s already up and running, and the technology works well enough that I have decided to lend a hand. Potentially, the gains could be very significant. In an extreme crisis, we could even work with authorities and allow the robot to call people with information and allow them to ask followup questions.
What I am doing for this group is to help them curate the content that the bot knows about. It is already online and open for calls, although it is still pretty stupid as the content is being updated as we speak.
So far I have helped them define a content strategy (in Swedish).
COVID19-Chatbot-Sweden - Hur tar vi ställning till innehåll.pdf (272.3 KB)
If we think that this fits in with the OCI lab Method, I would be very willing to work on this in that context and perhaps bring that initiative on to Edgeryders in some shape or form. It is currently very local to Sweden, but could easily be extended to other countries with local teams. Ping @nadia