Health News Assistant - An interactive flash briefing for exploring health stories

Why? Lately I've been thinking a lot about how voice apps can be used by news and media sites. Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are becoming integrated in more devices which creates an opportunity for us to explore content simply using our voice. By using machine learning and graph databases the voice app can find more relevant content and even explain why you might be interested in each story. This technology combined with NLU (Dialogflow) allows for a really unique voice app. The voice app itself was built with the amazing Jovo framework. Ideally, the text to speech welcome and the article intro would be replaced with human voice. But I would really love to hear your honest feedback on what you tough of the following features. 1. Explainable related content feature, where the assistant suggests related stories and explains how they are relevant. 2. Account linking to send yourself an email containing the link to the full story 3. Interactive briefing, where you can listen to the latest headlines and explore a story in more detail. The technology The first step in creating the experience was analyzing the posts from the Harvard Health Blog. In short, I extracted the entities, concepts, and topics mentioned in each article using IBM Watson. I then used these to create a graph, stored in Neo4j. This graph is then queried to create “explainable” content recommendations. Credits: The articles are all from the Harvard Health Blog. This action is not affiliated with the Harvard Health Blog. Somethings i’d like to try in the future: A similar voice app for news in the voice space