Health Assist Bot

I enjoyed exploring the various features offered by the Kore.ai XO platform to enhance Health Assist’s user experience and make it interactive. Of the vast suit of features that the Kore.ai XO platform offered to build the bot, I would like to highlight a few that helped me build the bot and make it more usable.

• Most chat bot conversations are bi-directional i.e. bot/user asks a question and the user/bot replies. This can be tedious when gathering large volumes of data from the user for example medical history when booking a doctor’s appointment or for bill payment. One feature of Kore.ai’s conversational platform that came in handy was – Forms. I felt this appropriate to gather all the details in one go and quite convenient for the user too. Forms were used for gathering information while booking doctor appointments, lab tests and payments.

• Using a sub-task for the payment module really paid off. I could reuse it in various places in my bot like paying for medical bills, lab tests and doctor appointments.

• Created custom dashboards for a bird’s eye view of the types of complaints raised, and the type of doctor requested for most appointments. I used pie charts to display these details so that the analysis can be done and action taken easily by the concerned person. In order to generate these charts message-level and bot-level meta tags had to be defined explicitly at the entity node and in some places in the bot action script node.

• Another template that I used was widgets and panels for displaying scheduled doctor appointments. For this, I had to enable Widget SDK. Based on the information being displayed and its purpose, I used various templates like carousels, lists, buttons, etc for different display purposes. But this had a downside. Because of this, I could not enable channels like WhatsApp, Telegram and others, since the display might not be supported by these channels and it might affect the bot performance.

• The “Talk to a doctor” feature in Health Assist was implemented using the Agent Transfer feature of the conversation builder. For this, I had to enable Botkit SDK and add an Agent Transfer node for that task. Also, two events – on Message and on Agent Transfer were enabled. This ensured that all the messages that the user enters after opting to Talk to a Doctor are transferred directly to a live agent, a doctor in this case, instead of the bot handling them.