Conversational AI for hospitals and medical centers

I spent part of 2019 in one of the leading Italian incubators since one of my projects, related to education, was accepted in an AI-focused program. 2 of the 10 selected projects were related to Conversational AI: which is definitely not a lot compared to the 2017 hype on chatbots.

I had the pleasure to talk with a company during the program. Currently, this company is cooperating with a credit card provider which is implementing a conversational AI tool to help the customer service. In this case, it’s merely helping a human operator to reduce the answer-to-customer time. However, a chatbot’s answer accuracy is not even 50% and a credit card customer facing an issue might become upset. In fact, providing customers service a tool prompting the 3 best answers and just picking the best one, save a lot of time (and money, in this case).

Industry maturity phase

Briefly, after the 2017 hype, the chatbot industry lost some interest: this is quite common and happens in any innovative domain.

However, it’s in the declining phase that talented developers bring to markets stellar products without the related hype noise. I see products like Amazon Alexa and Google Home a strong sign of an industry going mainstream. Despite the fact that they are still products with limited use cases, the investments so far are massive and indicate how technology leaders believe in conversational AI.

Conversational AI for the Health Sector

Last month I was in Malta at the Blockchain and AI summit. I went through an interesting company, EBO. They are employing AI to streamline business processes in hospitals and medical centers. In the AI industry, leaders can:

a) clearly explain where data come from

b) propose an innovative technology (not statistics 101 linear regression)