As the World Health Organisation has pointed out, along with the coronavirus pandemic we are also experiencing an infodemic, i.e. an excessive spread of false, misleading or poorly sourced news.
Misinformation is becoming as serious and dangerous a problem as Covid and we at Indigo.ai, in collaboration with Pagella Politica, IRCCS Ospedale San Raffaele and EURECOM, wanted to make our contribution by creating a solution that would help people not to fall into the trap of fake news.
For several years now, we have been hearing about the potential of artificial intelligence for fact-checking. Vera is one of the first experiments in this field, and the decision to focus on the Covid-19 emergency is due to the desire to test the effectiveness of this innovative technology in combating misinformation in a context of real need.
Is it true that 5G causes Covid or that the coronavirus was created in a laboratory? What is herd immunity and how long will it take to get a vaccine against Covid-19? To help people get a quick and accurate answer to these questions, Vera, the first Italian conversational assistant entirely dedicated to the Covid-19 health emergency, has been developed.
The virtual assistant is accessible through a dedicated website and helps users to better navigate the ocean of Covid-19-related content through an interactive chat conversation. Vera's 'Check hoaxes and data around the world' section can, for example, verify suspicious news stories circulating on WhatsApp or consult up-to-date statistics on the epidemic, while the 'Questions about Covid-19' section is dedicated to clarifying doubts on medical and scientific issues about the current epidemic. A lot of work has been done to give the assistant a strong visual identity that would enhance Vera's features.
Unique users interacted with the virtual assistant in the first three months of operation.
The number of messages exchanged between virtual assistant and users in the first three months of activity.
New news to be verified reported by users in the first three months of activity
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