Chatbots – the next big eHealth trend?

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Chatbots work independently of operating systems and integrate speech recognition and artificial intelligence. Will chatbots replace apps and websites?

Just one interface for everything – search engine, website, social media channels etc. This is what chatbots offer – without installing apps or searching websites. One in four Germans can imagine that a chatbot will answer their request automatically and thus simulate human conversation. One comes to this conclusion representative survey commissioned by the Bitkom digital association, According to experts, chatbots could become a competition for apps and websites. Franziska von Lewinski mentioned in one WCT article five reasons why apps and websites may become redundant.

Why chatbots will soon replace apps and websites

Messaging, convenience, compatibility and the time factor will become even more important in the future, according to Lewinski, board member at Fischer Appelt in Hamburg, and this is where chatbots come into play. "Messaging is the new social," predicts the agency manager for innovations and digital. Instead of diversity, the trend is currently towards concentration. One platform for everything. Advertisers should also build their own services directly into social networks. It will still be a few years before speech recognition is so perfect that chatbots have their full effect and a machine really understands us. But giving short instructions or dictating searches – that is already possible today. Lewinski says that human language is the most natural interface and is easiest to use for a personalized 1: 1 dialogue. They regularly show that manufacturers are also building more and more voice-controlled devices Trade fairs around the Internet of Things,

Who uses and develops chatbots

If you want to develop chatbots yourself, you can take part in appropriate workshops and seminars, for example at Deep Health. The lecturers promise that it will be easier and cheaper to develop a chatbot than an app. Often you only need a few hours and no programming knowledge. Since there is only one input and output field for chatbots, the costs for a design are eliminated. Although this limits the way information is presented, the first chatbots such as Your.MD or Babylon Health are already in use in healthcare. In general, chatbots could partially or even completely automate communication with customers and patients. This saves call center employees and should improve user satisfaction.

How chatbots help healthcare

With the service Your.MD can ask patients health-related questions and check symptoms of diseases. The answers are written and verified by doctors – verified by the UK National Health Service. Google will also expand its search engine in the future to include high-quality and valid health information. Like the medical community coliquio reports, Google is working on a so-called "Knowledge Graph" – a kind of info box that provides contextual knowledge of the search term after a search query. Since February 2016, the Knowledge Graph has also appeared in the US for health-related searches. If you google a disease, the first hit is an info box that shows what causes the disease, how it spreads, what symptoms occur, what treatment options are available and much more. According to Google, this content has been checked by experts from Mayo Clinic and Harvard Medical School. Chatbots could also access this reliable health information in the future.

Photo: © picjumbo.com / Viktor Hanacek

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