How Google’s AI helps during Covid-19

From sifting through huge research datasets to finding potential treatments, to more accurately forecasting the spread of the disease, to powering virtual agents to answer questions about Covid-19, AI is helping all kinds of organisations. The following are a few of the ways AI is helping during Covid-19.

Finding answers with the Kaggle Community

In March, The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced that it had 29,000 articles which have now grown to more than 59,000, that may contain answers to key questions about the virus. It turned to Kaggle, a Google Cloud subsidiary, to call upon its community of more than 4 million data scientists to use AI to help find these answers. Participants have already developed several text and data mining tools to search through this dataset, named Covid-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), to help answer critical questions like, “What do we know about Covid-19 risk factors?”, “What do we know about the virus’ genetics, origin and evolution?”, and more.

That same week, Kaggle doubled-down on its own efforts and challenged its community of data scientists in two forecast competitions: One focused on forecasting the spread of Covid-19 around the world, the other forecast the spread of the disease within California. 

Data scientists across the globe are collaborating to help the medical community defeat Covid-19 and you can follow the latest update at kaggle.com/covid19 and see the progress the community is making towards achieving the goals discussed at kaggle.com/covid-19-contributions. 

Rapid Response Virtual Agent program

In early April, Google launched the Rapid Response Virtual Agents program to help organisations that have been inundated with customer questions about the pandemic. The program helps businesses and retailers quickly build and implement a customised Contact Center AI virtual agent to respond to customer questions via chat or voice allowing customers to get 24/7 support.

PPP Lending AI Solution

Google developed the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) Lending AI Solution to help integrate Google’s AI-based document ingestion tools into lenders’ existing underwriting components and lending systems to make them more efficient. 

The PPP Lending AI Solution has three components, each of which can be used individually or in combination with each other:

1. The Loan Processing Portal is a web-based application that lets lending agents and/or loan applicants create, submit and view the status of their PPP loan application. 
2. The Document AI PPP Parser API enables lenders to use AI to extract structured information from PPP loan documents submitted by applicants. This component is available at no cost through June 30, 2020. 
3. Loan Analytics enables lenders to quickly onboard historical loan data, assist with the de-identification and anonymisation of sensitive information, store information securely and perform data analytics on this historical loan data. 

One of AI’s great strengths is helping solve complex problems and with the pandemic faced globally, it has managed to alleviate some of the burdens on businesses and organisations.