IBM and the Weather Channel: COVID-19 Tracker and Q&A with Watson
In March 2020, IBM Watson Advertising and The Weather Company launched the COVID-19 Hub, featuring Q&A with Watson across The Weather Channel’s digital properties. With over 450M monthly active users, The Weather Company is part of the daily routine for more than 40 million people. Keeping them safe during natural disasters has always been core to the brand’s mission.
By combining massive reach, brand trust, and location intelligence, the platform delivered fast, accessible, and hyper-localized COVID-19 information—precisely when and where users needed it most.
Platforms: Desktop, Web, Mobile, Tablet, App, CTV, OTT, IoT, Display
Features: 1st and 3rd party data, Interactive infographics, AI, Voice, Text Chat, Editorial & Video
Trusted Information, When It Mattered Most
The mobile COVID-19 Q&A with Watson is prominently featured in a 30-second national broadcast spot outlining IBM’s efforts to address COVID-19.
Delivering Trusted Information
In the early days of the outbreak, people wanted to know the number of cases near them and the rate of change in cases and trends over time. And the tracker’s functionality reflects that.
The product team made the trend tracker based on excellent Cognos work and refreshed the data every 15 minutes. Implementing agile work methods, the hub MVP took 8 days while working in parallel to design and develop the chatbot to be ready for launch in 4.5 days. Working alongside partners on the core product team and Watson Health, Research, and Marketing leaders.
A User Journey
For this New York City-based hub, a user’s location is dynamically populated with information relative to their county level. Utilizing the chatbot, users engage with voice, text, and simple topic buttons. See below to explore Signs & Symptoms.
When a user types, “How many cases in Peekskill”? Watson understands the intent of the question to be for Peekskill, New York, and prompts the user to view information for that specific location. Location data is instantly implemented, and the entire hub page changes to display relevant data for the county of Westchester in Peekskill, NY.
Multiple levels of IBM governance and legal were employed throughout our process. Once the data team organized the various approved data sets, they built the COVID bot on the Watson Ads framework. Enabling fast and flexible test and learn iterations.
Since launch, the teams have been able to look at the constantly streaming data and react. Revising design, content, and structure in addition to adjusting training and adding new intents based on trends in the marketplace.
Data, data, data…
How? By looking at trends and shifts in topic interest and comparing them to actual trending headlines and developments from the government and media.
In addition, the team built a tool to track the content on the CDC and WHO sites and get notified via Slack when a change is detected. Clarifying the difference so they can determine quickly and proactively if an update is needed within the corpus.
Webviews were implemented for faster implementation across platforms—potential partnerships with companies that can further empower and help consumers at scale. Anthem, CVS, and State Farm have all inquired about using the bot in their O&O properties to provide trusted answers to questions about primary care, treatment, and insurance claims.
Constant optimization of data and user inputs drive relevance for users. View high level IBM case study here.
A special moment for all was when former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty joined the last team stand-up. It meant a lot to be recognized by the national media and the public and to have Ginni join the scrum to humbly offer thanks, another sign of her powerful leadership skills.
Finally, Brian would be remiss for not thanking his team for everything they’ve done to make this cognitive tool a reality. Design is the intent behind the outcome. While the Core Watson Cognitive Advertising Design team is made up of Robert Redmond, January Holmes, Juliana Guimaraes, and Georgios Saliaris, it also includes a village of PMs, OMs, developers, engineers, data scientists, and so much more…. Sincere thanks go to:
Arjun Dharma - Data and real-time scrape engine
Brian Luksis - System automation and QA
Chethan Rajkumar - Backend dev
Dee Mustafa-Bowne - Consumer Product Lead
Donna Byron - NLP engineering and training
Geetha Vasudevan - Direction engineering co-lead
Joanne Santiago - Content QA and content attribution
Juliana Guimaraes - Design support, state health dept DB build
Jacky Chan - Frontend API integration dev
Paul Matchen - Frontend development lead
Monica Fogg - Corpus development and training
Priya Pradeep - Backend development and scrape engine support
Robert Redmond - AI Architect Designer
Sandeep Jaikaria - Web/mobile web QA
Sahana Subbanna - Frontend development
Vinusha Venugopal - Web/mobile web QA
Jay Lee - Backend data and systems integration
Meeting the Moment
Delivered across web, app, and voice interfaces, this tool supported millions of users with clear, accessible pandemic information.