Conversational Agents in Health Care —Reply

In Reply Dr Darcy and colleagues from Woebot Health cite 2 references when suggesting that the CA field is more developed than our Viewpoint suggested. However, we find the use of these references as being off target for 2 reasons. First, both articles address symptom checkers. Symptom checkers typically ask patients preset questions and permit structured or limited free-text replies. Thus, we would not consider symptom checkers to be CAs. Our Viewpoint focused on technologies that accept and interpret a broad range of typed or spoken words, phrases, and sentences and that offer natural-sounding language responses.
Source: JAMA - Category: General Medicine Source Type: research