I was on vacation over the 2016 Christmas period. At the office, we had recently concluded our Power Hour series for the year with an episode describing how we built a virtual assistant that made parliamentary recordings discoverable via Facebook messenger. 

We called that Hansard Speaks, and you can check out that episode here. 

So, I’m home thinking, ‘what next?’ when we had a new beginning of our own: my baby girl was born! Apart from the explosion of joy with her arrival, I was home for a month. 

Mind you: I understand that paternity leave is officially 3 days in Trinidad & Tobago. My company, Teleios Systems gives us a week. So, my wife and I agreed that I’d augment that with 3 weeks of vacation. In the end, we’re very glad we did. 

Anyway, being home with baby, witnessing the pains, frustrations & gladness of interacting with our public health systems, gave me the idea for my next virtual assistant: Nurse Carter. 

Nurse Carter is a virtual assistant that you can ask questions (kind of) and it will tell you when & where you can get access to various kinds of health services.
A few years ago, I used the data located on the Trinidad and Tobago Ministry of Health’s web pages as the base for a mobile app. I called the app, TT Health Facilities and I used it to list all the health facilities and the services they provided based on their schedule. So, I knew there was a place to retrieve this data from.

As we did when we built Hansard Speaks, I used the Microsoft Bot Framework, this time using NodeJS rather than C#. This one took a while to put together because crying baby trumps messy JavaScript. But it’s finally done, and you can access it directly on  the web or Facebook.

This was another opportunity to get into the technology around Lucene and that type of search experience, everything else was mostly hacking around in Node. I guess I’m sort of working my way up towards more natural language interactions. So maybe next time I’ll use Microsoft’s Cognitive Services’ Language Understanding Intelligent Service.