iFLYTEK has deployed a “Smart Speech Robot”, which utilizes AI-integrated speech technologies, to strengthen Shanghai’s mitigation efforts in the city’s worst COVID-19 resurgence since March.
In cooperation with telecommunications provider China Union, iFLYTEK developed the Smart Speech Robot, which makes efficient survey calls to collect information about nucleic acid testing among Shanghai citizens.
Shanghai began its two-phase quarantine on March 28th to track infections and curb the spread of the virus. The first phase of closed-off management and mass nucleic acid testing focused on areas east of the Huangpu River, while the second phase focused on the western areas on April 1st.
iFLYTEK’s Shanghai Branch received a request for assistance from the local pandemic prevention and control office to conduct an automatic phone survey about nucleic acid testing for nearly 70,000 people in a single day.
iFLYTEK’s Shanghai Branch immediately began collaborating with the company’s Smart Healthcare business unit to design a program using the Smart Speech Robot. iFLYTEK researchers cooperated with China Union to connect with the telecommunications infrastructure needed to conduct the survey.
iFLYTEK continued to optimize the Smart Speech Robot before its launch on April 2, only 48 hours after receiving the request for assistance.
Through these efforts, the Smart Speech Robot made automatic phone calls to roughly 70,000 people in just 3 hours. Without the automatic calls, community workers would have been overburdened and at greater risk of cross-infection.
Furthermore, the smart system automatically produced records allowing community and health workers to view the results and then easily follow up with anyone who needed to take nucleic acid test in a more targeted manner.
“Compared with traditional, manual calls, the smart system helped increase efficiency and minimize the risk of cross-infection for community workers who would otherwise be in call centers or going door-to-door. We will continue to use the smart system for automated community outreach in future epidemic prevention and control efforts to better account for our communities’ health status and provide more considerate services,” said the director of the local epidemic prevention and control office in Shanghai.
The iFLYTEK Smart Speech Robot also assisted the Changning District in Shanghai by sending mass notifications about mask orders and purchases, making automatic follow-up calls to quarantined residents, and distributing pandemic prevention tips to workers in the city in 2020. The automatic call system was listed as an exemplary case of the application of big data and artificial intelligence in COVID-19 prevention and control by the Chinese Preventive Medicine Association.
