Meet Aham! Your New Virtual Assistant Providing Information on COVID-19 in 7 Indian Languages
Bengaluru: In these concerning times, ever wondered you had a diligent buddy with authentic and relevant information about COVID-19? Well, that’s Aham! for you. Here is a virtual assistant helping you with answers to your concerns on COVID-19 in 7 Indian Languages! This virtual assistant Aham! is created by DheeYantra, the pioneers in Indian Languages NLP and conversational AI. Their product is employed by Banks and Insurance companies across India to automate client on-boardings and customer support through conversational AI, in multiple languages.
To combat the rise of fake news related to COVID-19 contagion across India and the world, one can now visit Aham.ai. In reply to your questions, Aham will provide you with factual information curated from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MHFW). Currently you can converse with Aham on www.aham.ai and on facebook messenger.
Currently Maharashtra and Kerala are the most affected states followed by Karnataka, Telangana, Delhi and others. This edition of Aham, quite responsive to the situation, will interact with the public in Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, Hindi and Tamil, in addition to English. DheeYantra is adding more Indian languages meanwhile to cater to vernacular speakers from other states too.
Aham majorly provides information about COVID-19 (Coronavirus), and the precautions one should take not to contract or contribute to the contagion. The bot also helps people to perform self-diagnosis to identify their risk profile. One can also get the statistics of worldwide spread of the contagion, emergency numbers to contact, information about covid-19 diagnostic and treatment centers designated by the Govt. etc.
Unlike traditional chatbots which work only with templated questions and answers, Aham is built over the conversational AI platform dhee.ai. This is highly relieving, as people need not stick to the templates given. They can ask their questions and respond to the bot like they do when they normally converse. Users can either speak to Aham using a microphone or type in their queries in their language of choice. Here too, if you are a native language user, but haven’t been using a local language keyboard, you can key in your query using English (Latin) alphabets via the normal QWERTY keyboards. The underlying Dhee platform will take care of the rest.
India is a country with a 1.3 billion population, of which only about 300 million understand English. It’s important that the rest of the populace has easy access to factual information from trusted sources, in the same language they speak and comprehend. DheeYantra, has thus taken this initiative to help this huge segment of people. If you don’t see your native language in the initial list that Aham supports, don’t worry, the team is working on it and other languages will be available shortly.
The only way we can stop COVID-19 from permanently disturbing our lives is by understanding the steps taken by the govt., adhering to the prescribed guidelines and taking all the precautions that we personally can. Let’s stay informed through Aham and stay strong. Rest assured, language won’t be a barrier for the same.