A chatbot used by Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MOH) has been turned off after it was found to provide inappropriate answers to residents’ queries.
Some of the gaffes from the tool appeared online earlier this week.
The suggestion that practicing safe sex by using a condom is the way to help a child with COVID was one of the errors posted on Reddit.
A photo shows a user asking a chatbot a question about his son’s positive test:
“My son tested COVID-19 positive what should I do?”
Jamie says: “You should practice safe sex through the correct and consistent use of condoms, or abstinence, for at least the whole duration of your female partner’s pregnancy.”
The chatbot is the world’s first Whole-of-Government Virtual Assistant was created by the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech) in 2014. There are 70 government agency websites where the bot is deployed. Ask Jamie has been encouraged by GovTech in the past to be used by Singaporeans.
GovTech Singapore believes that technology helps to provide direct responses to people who prefer to search for information online. In turn, manpower can also be redirected to handle more complex queries and issues, it said.
“Ask Jamie taps on its Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine to understand the questions posed by the public and responds with an appropriate answer,” according to GovTech on its website. “When an answer entails multiple permutations, Ask Jamie can be trained to ask follow-on questions to refine the answer to one relevant to the user’s query.”
In my opinion, Ask Jamie is such a big chatbot which covers multiple government agencies.
It could have been broken down to a specific function to avoid such replies and prevent wrong information. Like the COVID19AIBot, which I created on 17 April 2020 during the early days of COVID-19 spreading across different countries. The chatbot’s function is simply to show the number of cases per country, deaths, recovery, and active cases.
I guess there were some technical errors in handling fallback ( a re-routing process if the bot doesn’t understand the query) which led to Ask Jamie, giving an in-appropriate answer. Just a lucky mistake I guess….
Anyways, GovTech is already planning to retire her and replace her with Ask Emma. Let’s just hope that the new version is properly trained with Natural Language Processing (NLP).
So for now Ask Jamie No More!
