From Playa del Rey, Calif., comes the news that David Kirsh, professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego, working with a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has chosen SmartAction Virtual Agents to capture and report on student illness symptoms at an elementary school in 4S Ranch.

 

Smart Action provides automated virtual agents powered by artificial intelligence that answer and make calls for contact centers, company officials say: 'The system also features natural language speech recognition and synthesis technology.'

 

The pilot project was established to determine if increased information about medical absences reported to schools would lead to improved intelligence about contagious diseases, possible biological attacks or other notable trends in student health, Kirsh said: 'This type of system greatly improves information quality and enables more rapid analysis, allowing us to detect trends in symptoms and disease.'

 

SmartAction officials explained how it works: When parents call the school to report children absent or ill, the SmartAction Virtual Agent answers the call and asks a number of questions about symptoms. Information provided goes into a database for later reporting and analysis.

 

The Virtual Agent identifies parents or relatives based on Caller ID, and remembers yesterday’s symptoms for speedy reporting. The system also gives callers the option to provide additional information, which is recorded.

The results are then reported to researchers either by e-mail with a summary of information captured, including recorded parts, via a real-time database update to the university system or by a Web-based report with a click-to-listen feature.

 

'After a poor experience trying a conventional interactive voice system, it was clear we had to find something more advanced to do the job,' Kirsch said. 'Smart Action had the technology to provide an optimal caller experience and capture the needed information.'

 

Peter Voss, CEO of Smart Action, called it 'an ideal project for our artificial-intelligence-based Virtual Agents. Not only is the necessary information captured but it is available to the school district and the CDC in a database. They have real time access to current health trends and will be able to mine growing historical data to uncover longer-term trends.'

 

At the conclusion of the pilot program at the end of the school year, Kirsh and other researchers will present their findings to the CDC and hope that it will be adopted as the new way to gather such information in schools and districts across the state and country.

 

About a year ago TMC’s (News - Alert) Ranju Baburajan reported that Smart Action Company, a subsidiary of an Adaptive AI, has launched of SmartAction IVR System, according to the company.

 

Interactive voice response detects speech and keyword inputs from callers, and responds with appropriate answers. They also route calls they can’t handle to human agents. Typically IVR systems lower costs by reducing the need for human agents.