IBM Launches Watson Assistant For Citizens To Deliver Fast & Accurate COVID-19 Information

IBM has announced that the company is now offering a bundle of Watson services to handle COVID-19 queries. The services are designed for the government agencies, academic institutions and health care organisations to manage the chaos of COVID-19 questions.

The Big Blue announced that the company is packaging its Watson Assistant with IBM Research's natural language processing technology and Watson Discovery to form IBM Watson Assistant for Citizens. 

The company is making its Watson suite available free for citizens for at least 90 days and is available via online and phone formats. According to IBM spokesperson, the lag between COVID-19 related queries and its response time is exceeding more than two hours. With the use of artificial intelligence-based technologies via Watson, IBM may be able to speed up responses to common COVID-19 questions.

Watson Assistant for Citizens is made available on IBM's public cloud, ingests data from various sources such as the US Centres for Disease Control & Prevention and other local authorities such as states, cities and school districts.

The assistant — Watson Assistant for Citizens — is available in more than 11 languages like English and Spanish. It also has been pre-trained with 15 COVID-19 intents. The Watson services are available in the US and have been used in countries like the Czech Republic, Finland, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK.

The Watson Assistant for Citizens is already in use, and some of the organisations using it includes the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences; County of Otsego in New York; the City of Austin in Texas; the UK National Health Service Wales; and the Polish Ministry of Health.

The company has also rolled out supercomputing resources to analyse COVID-19 as well as mapping tools from The Weather Company to track the coronavirus.