2021: Hello, I’m Nadine…

Many people around the world know about our project the #DigitalHuman #CardiacCoach - but that is not our only humanitarian cause.  

 This is an extract of a conversation with an AI powered digital human answering general questions that are typically asked about the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).  

 You’ll have read about #Nadia not being available – well, meet #Nadine who is training to answer questions on the #NDIS based on our lived experience and co-design research.  

 More about “Nadine” during the year.

The construction of complex bureaucratic information and the inability of people to access and understand it - especially disadvantaged people who are health illiterate - is endemic to healthcare, disability services and access to justice.  As research has shown, health illiteracy is widespread and affects even the most educated people.

Our "Co-Design for AI"© methodology (which we released for free on GitHub in May 2019) is applicable to all these servicing settings given the common patterns of conversations that occur in the search for contextual and accessible information in complex servicing environments. 

We built the “Nadine” Intelligent Agent in Google Dialogflow using their free ES license and their ES Console. The “Nadine” digital human was hosted by Trulience using their free trial licence.  Under the free trial licence, we used one of their stock faces and their base expression mark-up. 

We created the Intelligent Agent on the Google Dialogflow US server so that we could use their beta Knowledge Base functionality. This enabled us to upload, via a csv file, an extract of several hundred questions from the corpus of intents and responses that we have developed. 

Trulience provide simple and clear instructions in their documentation on how to integrate a Google Dialogflow Intelligent Agent with Trulience. This involved creating a Google Cloud Platform Service Account and JSON key from our “Nadine” Intelligent Agent. 

The interaction between Marie Johnson and “Nadine” was recorded on a MacBook Pro with Trulience running in Google Chrome.