Mobile application: general use Chatbot for COVID-19 / Muhammad Iqbal Idham Rosnon

COVID-19 has been plaguing the world since late 2019 and is still a major problem today. Malaysian government made a lot of effort in countering the outbreak by imposing new laws and norms. It can be quite confusing for citizens with many new things introduced and enforced. This project aims to mitigate those confusion and questions by providing a chat-service bot that can answer user’s inquiries regarding COVID-19 in Malaysia. This would also directly assist in the alleviation of the virus infections by raising and spreading awareness through the system. The effort made solely with the purpose to educate citizens of Malaysia with information related to the virus, standard procedures and vaccination. Various researches have been made to understand more regarding chatbot as a service through case studies, articles and published papers. All of the research sources can be found in the reference section. From the researches done, the approach and techniques to be used in developing the system became clearer after reviewing multiple alternatives available. By comparing different methods, the best option can be chosen when it is best suited for the system to serve its purpose. Part-of-speech tagging is the most suitable approach for this system as it covers all basis and requirements of a rule-based chatbot adequately. The completion of research phase helped tremendously in developing the chatbot system proposed due to clearer understanding of the architecture and framework. The process continues with system design, development and implementation undertaken in order to produce the system prototype as a deliverable. Rigorous testing, trial and error efforts was made to complete the development of the system. The system strives to serve its goals in educating and raising awareness to citizens by being engaging and interactive with users in a natural conversation. The analysis of the system does indicate that the system can be improved greatly in the future works with the implementation of Artificial Intelligence into the core system being one of them. The chatbot service would then be able to learn new queries and responses given time as it develops and evolves.