The National Institute of Information and Communications Strategy (NIICS) under the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) several days ago held a workshop on developing platforms with chatbots for online public services that check Covid-19 symptoms and conduct online sociological surveys.

The workshop is part of a cooperation program between MIC and APT, with the participation of experts from Japan, Vietnam and representatives of APT Secretariat.

NIICS Director Nguyen Thanh Phuc said the purpose is to develop an online public service platform based on chatbots. With this system, state management agencies will be able to interact with people via chatbots that answer questions, give automatic messages and conduct electronic surveys to check epidemic symptoms, thus contributing to prevention and treatment plans.

Chatbots will approach people in the quickest possible way, and at the same time discover areas with high infection levels, and give prompt responses.

Vietnam understands the importance and effectiveness of IT solutions such as AI and chatbot to save money in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. By assessing the appropriateness when deploying IT in epidemic prevention and control, Vietnam may become a model for other countries in Asia Pacific, according to Phuc.

NIICS has joined forces with the Japanese KDDI Fund in developing chatbot systems. The chatbot platform has been 100 percent completed with the chatbot capable of recognizing contexts, understanding Vietnamese language, and communicating.

Nguyen Quynh An, deputy head of the IT Division, said the chatbot platform has been embedded into official websites of Vietnamese authorities with the two aforementioned apps.

The system runs on open-source codes compatible with popular messaging channels such as Facebook Messenger, Telegram and Slack. Developers can directly embed chatbots in websites or software without codes. 

The chatbot platform can support many languages in analyzing and processing conversational contexts.

As many as 20,000 reports about Covid-19 symptoms have been sent by people to the chatbot system. The chatbot's survey feature has recorded about 5,000 responses.

NIICS has recommended to expand configuration and features of the chatbot system to be used for searching for data, sharing public information and providing Q&A services about business licenses.

Chatbot will allow people to access data.gov.vn to get the information they want without having to navigate through websites.

Trong Dat