MANILA, Philippines – A new “knowledge management” tool is currently being rolled out by Philippine startup Senti AI to help the Department of Health (DOH) provide smarter automated responses across all its channels. 

With the new AI-assisted tool, the DOH will be providing information to Senti AI – FAQs, policy guidelines, survey questions – which will then be fed into Senti AI’s system. The data is analyzed and processed to train the system, with the end goal of mapping more accurate responses for the DOH’s communication partners such as chatbot providers (i.e. the KontraCOVID chatbot). 

Here’s an illustration of how the tool is trained: 

Google, whose technology powers Senti AI’s system, said in a statement that this will “unburden the citizens from sifting through hundreds of documents with different versions of the same policy.”

At the same time, the smart database is designed to ensure that all DOH channels get the most recent information simultaneously. Google explained that one problem is that because of rapid developments, there are currently communication update delays between the DOH channels and those asking for the information. “This means that a citizen or LGU based in the province may receive different versions of the same information from a chatbot or a call center partner,” the company said.

“This will help guarantee that important information communicated by all DOH partners is updated and consistent across all channels,” and that major cities and remote areas “can all be in-sync with the latest and official guidelines.” 

The service is hosted on Google Cloud, using various AI technologies such as natural language understanding, intent detection, and entity detection. These technologies are said to work together to make sure that chatbots are able to “intelligently capture the context behind an inquiry and provide the most relevant and up-to-date answers from DOH’s official knowledge source.”

Senti AI will also be providing the application programming interface (API) that the chatbot providers will use to link up to the knowledge management tool. 

“The DOH hopes that this effort can mitigate the spread of fake news by providing a reliable and verified source of information that can be accessed by all citizens,” said DOH undersecretary Maria Vergeire. – Rappler.com