The past couple of months has been a nightmare for Indians. Never before has there been so much collective desperation and despair around us, as people scrambled to find beds, oxygen cylinders, ICU beds, medicines and other critical supplies for loved ones battling COVID19. However, right from the beginning of the pandemic, technology has been a huge boon - from enabling rapid remote work, drug repurposing & discovery and accelerating the pace of testing and diagnosis.

The stress of finding essential resources and supplies notwithstanding, Indians were also battling another deluge - of misinformation and outdated leads. Social networking platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Telegram among others were very active in amplifying SOS calls, but people quickly realised that much of the information circling about was outdated or incorrect. At such a crucial time, conversational AI bots have proven to be extremely handy in supplying the right information to the appropriate people, and weed out incorrect information before it gets passed on to more people.

Here are some conversational AI bots that are providing critical information, assistance and guidance on COVID19 supplies to citizens in these tough times, and aiding healthcare organisations mobilise supplies in a timely fashion:

Introbot: Run by Divyaansh Anuj and Utkarsh Roy, Introbot provides users with an evolving and verified database of beds, oxygen cylinders, plasma and other sources through Whatsapp. The AI community manager connects members based on their needs, which need to be entered in the 'X in Y' format like "Oxygen in Delhi" or "Plasma in Bangalore". The bot will then generate a list of verified leads. After the session is concluded, a 5-point feedback immensely helps the tech team determine how useful the session was and if they need to incorporate any changes for the next user. The startup has partnerships and volunteer support across India, and has over 25,000 entries for COVID supplies

Yellow Messenger: The Bangalore-based startup launched ‘Yellow Messenger Cares’ a CSR initiative to empower organizations with Covid-19 help-related Omnichannel Chatbots. With no prerequisites or conditions attached, any NGO, hospital, support group or business can get an AI chatbot built by Yellow Messenger to drive crisis efforts. Yellow Messenger Cares will provide access to an omni-channel chatbot on any text platform for Covid19 related use cases. These could support real-time services like providing medical information related to plasma donation, oxygen/hospital bed availability, vaccine registrations, scheduling appointments, collecting patient data, mental health assistance, handling insurance queries and more

Mission MillionAir: Bangalore-based Verloop.io, in collaboration with KVN Foundation's Mission MillionAir, launched an automated chatbot to connect citizens in need of oxygen, including hospitals and individuals. The company is working with medical manufacturers, NGOs, charities, food delivery networks, organizations, and groups associated with Covid-19 care for collecting the required information for its chatbot.

@CovidIndResBot: Built by students of the School of Accelerate Learning (SOAL), @CovidIndResBot or COVID India Resources Bot is a Twitter bot that provides verified information to queries on about COVID supplies in realtime. The endeavour is supported by a number of developers and startups like TravelXP, The Product Folks and Introbot among others. 

Microsoft Azure Health Bot: Microsoft announced the expansion of Azure Health Bot, a managed service purpose-built for the development of virtual healthcare assistants, to eight new regions including India, especially after the surge seen in the recent weeks. Azure Health Bot empowers developers in healthcare organizations to build and deploy AI-powered, compliant, conversational healthcare experiences at scale while ensuring alignment with organizational and industry compliance requirements including HIPAA and HITRUST. It can be easily customized to support any type of conversational use cases.

Orbita: While the current crisis is centered on providing emergency care, eventually vaccine scheduling, procurement and management will become a flashpoint. Orbita, a HIPAA-compliant conversational voice and chatbot solutions for healthcare, released a new communication module that integrates proactive messaging with intelligent virtual assistants to automate outreach for patient education, notification, scheduling, and more. Healthcare organizations have deployed Orbita solutions during the COVID-19 pandemic for symptom monitoring, vaccine eligibility screening, and vaccine scheduling.