Research undertaken into the development of a chatbot service has highlighted the benefits to charities, especially those working in the healthcare field, of this growing use of technology, has been published in JMIR Human Factors.
The Ask Anxia service provided on its website by Anxiety UK was developed over an 18-month period with regular monitoring and performance reviews to ensure optimum output.
Chatbots are increasingly being applied in the context of health care, providing access to services when there are constraints on human resources.
Simple, rule-based chatbots are suited to high-volume, repetitive tasks and can therefore be used effectively in providing users with important health information. The paper reports on the implementation of a chatbot service called Ask Anxia as part of a wider provision of information and support services offered by the UK national charity, Anxiety UK.
It reflects on the changes made to the chatbot over the course of approximately 18 months as the Anxiety UK team monitored its performance and responded to recurrent themes in user queries by developing further information and services.
The team demonstrate how corpus linguistics can contribute to the evaluation of user queries and the optimization of responses.
On the basis of these observations of how Anxiety UK has developed its own chatbot service, recommendations for organisations looking to add automated conversational interfaces to their services are provided.
The full paper can be read at JMIR Human Factors – Implementation of Anxiety UK’s Ask Anxia Chatbot Service: Lessons Learned
Ends
Anxiety UK is a national registered charity formed in 1970 by someone living with agoraphobia for those affected by anxiety disorders. Today we are still a user-led organisation, run by people with experience of living with anxiety or anxiety-based depression, supported by a high-profile medical advisory panel.
Discover more about Anxiety UK:
Anxiety UK is a national registered charity formed in 1970 by someone living with agoraphobia for those affected by anxiety disorders. Today we are still a user-led organisation, run by people with experience of living with anxiety or anxiety-based depression, supported by a high-profile medical advisory panel.
