A Smart Virtual Assistant Answering Questions About COVID-19

Numerous information and news put forward by different sources during the COVID-19 pandemic have caused many questions about the epidemic in people's minds. In this study, a smart virtual assistant was developed in order to eliminate this information pollution about COVID-19 and to give correct answers to people's questions with information obtained from reliable sources. Intelligent virtual assistants are question answering system software that enable people to get answers easily and quickly to their questions curious about. The use of these virtual assistants is becoming widespread all over the world in many fields, especially in education, e-commerce, tourism, finance and health. However, the number of question-answering system studies on Turkish is very few and insufficient. In fact, no question-answering study was found in the field of health that is presented for Turkish in the literature. The smart virtual assistant presented within the scope of this study is a first in this respect. This smart virtual assistant answers two different types of questions. The first of these is frequently asked information questions about COVID-19 among the people. The second is the questions about numerical data such as number of COVID-19 cases, number of deaths, number of tests, etc. of countries in the world. It has been observed that the developed virtual assistant can answer the vast majority of users' questions about COVID-19. It is thought that this smart virtual assistant could be useful in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.