ValueFirst and COVID.army team up to escalate the fight against COVID-19

ValueFirst and COVID. army team up to escalate the fight against COVID-19

With the second wave of COVID-19, times have been incredibly hard for India. Team at ValueFirst, a Twilio company and COVID.army joined forces to fuel India’s fight against COVID-19.

The teams jointly worked on a WhatsApp-based chatbot called ‘IND COVID bot’. The initiative aims to empower 1400+ Indian cities with crisis relief through a verified crowdsourced list of resources. The chatbot can help you find hospital beds, oxygen, injections, medicines, ambulance, plasma, test providers, and food.

WhatsApp being India’s most popular messaging app, the medium provided convenience to both providers and distressed people to find help. People in need can simply type the name of their city and find help.

India is also undergoing its vaccination drive. Via a 3rd party service, the chatbot notifies people when a vaccine slot is available in the pin code of their choice. Additionally, the chatbot also welcomes volunteers who wish to work on verifying the data and lead.

What makes the offering one of its kind?

• Real-time dynamic feedback evaluation that filters out invalid and non-responsive numbers
• Multilingual - The bot is available in both English and Hindi languages
• Users can avail of a 100% free video doctor consultation through Eka Care
• Provide a list of causes from where users can make donations
• The bot can identify fraudulent numbers, report, and add those numbers directly to the National Fraud Database
• Largest database of verified 10k+ COVID essentials suppliers in India across 10+ categories and 100+ cities sourced in real-time from social media platforms such as Twitter
• 1400+ fraud-reported contacts across India being sourced from social media. The social screening tool is built using Machine Learning and can identify numbers listed inside of images on Twitter and not just the text of the tweet

Speaking on the partnership, Rahul Garg from COVID.army said “Creating an extensive multilingual chatbot is no easy feat, but we made this possible in record time only because of the support from the ValueFirst team. We are privileged to have found a partner in them and build accessible technology that is saving valuable lives and disseminating verified knowledge.”

Vish Bajaj, CEO & Founder of ValueFirst said “It is testing times indeed. We are glad to have found COVID.army as our partner in India’s fight against this deadly second wave. They played a pivotal role in making this partnership possible. We can't thank the volunteers enough for their on-ground contributions. We truly hope that this WhatsApp-based chatbot can help more people and save lives.”

The two teams plan to add a slew of new and enhanced features over the next few weeks to make the chatbot even more useful for end users, especially in tier 2 audiences.

The chatbot can be accessed here or by sending a simple ‘Hi’ to +91 74042 55034.

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