By Devashish Mamgai
The adoption of smartphones in India due to the “Digital India” campaign and the Covid-19 pandemic has driven the adoption of smartphone technology by necessity and force, resulting in a figure of around 600 million users in 2021. Integration of life services like Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Aadhaar, CoWin and WhatsApp Healthdesk Mobile phones have greatly simplified the earlier complex processes. With a daily usage of 12GB per user per month, India’s rapidly growing digital footprint has put it in the market for tech space players who can implement higher efficiency, better connectivity and a more user-friendly experience.
India’s confidence in smartphones, as well as the pandemic situation made people more savvy with the devices. This led to innovations in all areas centered around the device we carry in our pockets every day. During the pandemic, a joint initiative between WhatsApp, the Government of India’s Digital Department (MyGov) and the Union Ministry of Health was to create a health desk chatbot that could be accessed through WhatsApp chat. The platform revolutionized the user experience of tracking vaccines, resolving medical concerns and booking appointments with doctors through a simple text message sent to this bot. Conversational AI chatbots were proven as a concept with this initiative that has been used by more than two crore people.
Chatbots bring reliability, accountability and flexibility to a system that relies on these three factors every day:
- CredibilityWith all information stored on a sharable, secure database to keep track of appointments, medications, diagnoses and responses for patients, doctors can monitor each patient’s progress.
- ResponsibilityWhere both patients and doctors are kept up to date on what needs to be done, whether it’s keeping a medication schedule for a patient or running tests for a doctor, both are tracked and stored, ready for use at any time.
- and finally, flexibility Available round-the-clock from any location comes through a chatbot – ensuring patients and doctors are connected, updated and reassured. Chatbots do all this through simple, conversational messages, often sent to the patient and doctor’s email inbox or chat screen, saving time on both sides.
A chatbot can also help assess and clerk the patient’s pre-consultation, where they will save the data provided by the patient and provide it to the doctor before the appointment to better prepare the patient for a detailed diagnosis. Or, if a patient has already been diagnosed, a chatbot is constantly with them, providing information, medication and appointment scheduling at their fingertips. The unfortunate catalyst of the pandemic played a part in the development of chatbots, where individuals who could not leave their homes or meet in person were given the opportunity to quickly track their symptoms, set up appointments and accurately identify the specific service they needed. The self-learning nature of AI chatbots allowed them to gather more data and learn from it, shifting their focus from transactional jobs to real-time conversationalists capable of more sophisticated interactions.
In India, many cultures and corporations have led to the development of chatbots in their language, use-cases and flexibility. with Health care Being the most active market for chatbots in the country, the low cost of setup has made it more attractive for more and more corporations to adopt and fully utilize this technology.
Chatbots are an evolution in customer care, and with new and exciting developments – they could become the essential standard. An emerging market, rapidly developing technology and a welcoming user base could propel AI chatbots into the customer service standard within a few years. Healthcare has already seen an overhaul in India, where appointments, vaccines, advice and paperwork have all been streamlined and provided without the hassle we know so well.
Devashish Mamgain, founder of Kommunicate.io, an AI-based chatbot service provider
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