Startups fight COVID-19: Slang Labs is using voice AI to help coronavirus related search

Bengaluru-based Slang Labs has created a voice-enabled tool that can be added onto any existing mobile or web apps to get COVID-19-related details. The tool lets users command their devices to perform actions without having to touch the screen.

Kumar Rangarajan, Co-founder, Slang Labs, shared in a tweet that this multilingual voice assistant tool can be added on any Covid-19-related website, and the company would do it without any cost.

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Speaking to YourStory, Kumar Rangarajan said that they want to do their bit to fight this battle. He said,

"As Covid now rages through all of India, tracking Covid resources like beds, ICU, plasma, funding, etc., has become very crucial. There are many websites that have now come up to help the common man track them, but they are typically built for the tech population. We wanted to help these websites reach more people by adding a multi-lingual Voice Assistant on top of them, which would allow users to just talk to these websites and ask what they want and the app can respond accordingly."

Rangarajan said Slang Labs, which uses augmented voice experiences, had added a similar voice assistant to a Covid-19 dashboard last year, which he claims to have helped. These tools support languages like English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam, among others, and work for apps as well as website.

Slang Labs created another similar tool last year for covid19india.org, and created https://covid19.slanglabs.in. But during the second wave, it ended up making a copy rather than adding it to the original one because the team was not able to reach the tech team which had developed it last year. 

"This time we wanted to directly connect to the developers if they are interested and extend our help to them," said the Co-founder. 

According to the Indian health ministry data, on Wednesday (May 5, 2021), a record 3,780 fresh COVID-19 fatalities were registered in a single day in the country, taking the death toll to 2,26,188, while 3,82,315 new coronavirus infections were recorded. With the fresh cases, the total tally of COVID-19 cases in the country climbed to 2,06,65,148.