ReviewPatterns (New York, N.Y.)2021
Did chatbots miss their "Apollo Moment"? Potential, gaps, and lessons from using collaboration assistants during COVID-19.
Review in Patterns (New York, N.Y.), 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Fact-Checking Large Language Model Responses to a Health Care Prompt: Comparative Study.JMIR formative research · 2026Article
- Evaluating User Experience With a Chatbot Designed as a Public Health Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brazil: Mixed Methods Study.JMIR human factors · 2023Article
- A review of the explainability and safety of conversational agents for mental health to identify avenues for improvement.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have long been positioned as a tool to provide crucial data-driven decision support to people. In this survey paper, I look at how collaboration assistants (chatbots for short), a type of AI that allows people to interact with them naturally (such as using speech, gesture, and text), have been used during a true global exigency-the COVID-19 pandemic. The key observation is that chatbots missed their "Apollo Moment" when at the time of need, they could have provided people with useful and life-saving contextual, personalized, and reliable decision support at a scale that the state-of-the-art makes possible. By "Apollo Moment", I refer to the opportunity for a technology to attain the pinnacle of its impact. I review the chatbot capabilities that are feasible with existing methods, identify the potential that chatbots could have met, and highlight the use-cases they were deployed on, the challenges they faced, and gaps that persisted. Finally, I draw lessons that, if implemented, would make them more relevant in future health emergencies.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.