• WHO’s new AI chatbot released on 2nd April called S.A.R.A.H. or the Smart AI Resource Assistant for Health faces new challenges as it settles into its proposed role to be a tool for educating people and filling staffing gaps in healthcare globally.

• The tool is built up on Florence, a virtual health worker project which provided basic information on Covid-19 and tobacco. 

• The tools are designed by a New Zealand based company called Soul Machines Ltd.

• It’s trained using OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5 with data till September 2021, thus it often returns inaccurate results.

• It has a limited purview and lacks a diagnostic feature, something that is common in the early days of AI development.

• The tool saves human expressions from the user’s data to be able to mimic human emotions. 

• While WHO claims the data is deleted after 30 seconds and is anonymised with regards to the IP address, using open software exposes it to risk from cybercriminals.

• Thus, the chatbot needs to be carefully developed to become useful in the future.

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