Did Chatbots Miss Their 'Apollo Moment'? A Survey of the Potential, Gaps and Lessons from Using Collaboration Assistants During COVID-19
It identifies gaps and lessons for improving chatbots in future health emergencies, but is incremental as a survey.
The paper examines how collaboration assistants (chatbots) were used during the COVID-19 pandemic, finding that they missed a key opportunity to provide scalable, personalized decision support despite existing technological capabilities.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have long been positioned as a tool to provide crucial data-driven decision support to people. In this survey paper, we look at how AI in general, and collaboration assistants (CAs or chatbots for short) in particular, have been used during a true global exigency - the COVID-19 pandemic. The key observation is that chatbots missed their "Apollo moment" when they could have really provided contextual, personalized, reliable decision support at scale that the state-of-the-art makes possible. We review the existing capabilities that are feasible and methods, identify the potential that chatbots could have met, the use-cases they were deployed on, the challenges they faced and gaps that persisted, and draw lessons that, if implemented, would make them more relevant in future health emergencies.