Coronavirus: Meet Aham! Your virtual assistant providing COVID-19 information in 7 Indian languages

In order to ensure the dissemination of correct information about the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, the virtual assistant Aham has been launched. It can provide information in seven different languages.

Aham has been created by DheeYantra, the pioneers in Indian languages Natural Language Processing and conversational AI. (Their products are employed by banks and insurance companies across India to automate client on-boardings and customer support through conversational AI, in multiple languages.)

Aham, available at Aham.ai, provides 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.

Maharashtra and Kerala are the most COVID-19 affected states in India followed by Karnataka, Telangana and Delhi. This edition of Aham 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 explains 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.

Unlike traditional chatbots which work only with templated questions and answers, Aham is built over the conversational AI platform dhee.ai. This means an exchange in a conversational manner can be had.