
Activity: AI Bootcamp
Give Wilbur a good workout.
Our chatbot, Wilbur, has been given a new intent called “HealthComplaint”, and we would like your assistance in training him to recognize such complaints (this was not his initial purpose). Before the start of this week, Wilbur has only received one example of a ‘health complaint’ from us (as you can see in the image), so his dataset is extremely limited and he will likely fail in his new job at the beginning.
In this activity, the Siri&Sibs team would appreciate it if you could make a few (or many) ‘health complaints’ to Wilbur as you interact with our OER over the course of this week. As the week goes by, one of us will be monitoring Wilbur’s progress and giving him feedback, thus allowing him to learn, and become better at recognizing health-related complaints.
Please keep in mind that we’re not asking you to give Wilbur tricky or confusing statements to process (too early for that), but feel free to channel your inner 5-years-old and use vague statements. It might be interesting to see if it could be possible to have an AI look after the health of children.
As you train Wilbur, we ask that you keep track of the number of complaints you made in your training session (it’s okay if they’re repetitive or very similar) and how many of them were successfully identified by Wilbur.
In order to make it easy to for you to find out if Wilbur has recognized your intent, he was only given two possible responses to your health complaints – both start with “I have identified your statement as a health complaint.” If you receive any other responses, it means that Wilbur is relying on a more generalized set of instructions (“canned responses”) and isn’t really recognizing the meaning of your statement.
Please use the comment section of this page to let us know the results of your session (ie. Number of complaints: ____ . Correct responses: ____ .)
If we, as a group, manage to give Wilbur a large enough dataset, we should start seeing the number of correct responses increase as time progresses.
I asked/said 5 things:
I have a headache
why do I yawn
im tired
my toe hurts
i am bleeding
The only correct response was to my toe hurts. The rest often asked me to repeat the questions or said that ” I didn’t catch that”
Thanks for helping train Wilbur. Please drop by again and give him another workout. 🙂
BTW, I know that “I’m tired” coming from a child could be an indication of a health issue – they don’t yet have the words to truly describe how they feel, but I chose to not include that in the training for now because it seems to be something that’s being caught by some other automated response (so, you’re unlikely to be getting “I didn’t understand that”).
I asked five questions about eye complaints. Only one was recognized as a health issue. Two were recognized as having to do with the human body. Two were not recognized at all.
My comments were along these lines (sorry, I didn’t record them as I went):
My vision is blurry. (Not recognized.)
My eyes are red and itchy.
My eyes are sore.
Thanks for your contribution. 🙂

Don’t worry about recording your complaints. I do see them on my end. br>
Number of complaints: 5
Correct responses: 2
It is a fun idea! I really wanted to help train the app, but after the first request (I have a tooth ache) every health complaint after that I got an error message “sorry it seemed like there was an error during that request”
I can’t wait to try again!
Trish
Hi Trish.
It must have been a server issue with the API.ai side of things – Wilbur seems to be working again (and eager to hear your health complaints 😉 )
Number complaints: 5
Correct responses: 4
Wilbur is getting smarter with more data sets!
One of the responses was: I’m always fascinated by just how complex the human body really is.
It seems like Wilbur is building a category or database of all body parts and along with associated works commonly used to describe one’s symptoms such as “hurt”, “ache”, “blurry”, “ouchy”. When a descriptor that is new and not recognized based historical entries it responds with a more general statement about the body.
Great job with the ‘getting technical’ section. I learned a lot how bots function and have a better appreciation for how larger data sets can improve AI performance over time.
Hi Edwin,
You’re absolutely right. Wilbur doesn’t seem to be relying on sentence structure to identify health complaints. Instead, the AI behind him seems to have started looking for sentences that relate to particular body parts and symptoms as you suggested.
This may not seem like a big deal but it’s worth repeating that Wilbur has not been programmed to identify health complaints. He has simply been shown a few sample complaints, and has made the necessary conclusions. While the name of the intent is “HealthComplaint”, I could have just as easily named the intent: “SuperUnnecessarilyLongIntentNameThatIsNotIndicativeOfTheActualFunction” and given Wilbur the same training. The final result would have been the same.
Number of complaints: 5
Correct responses: 4
This was a fun activity! When Wilbur could not identify if a verb describing a complaint was entered it said: I’m always fascinated by just how complex the human body really is.
Great job on the ‘getting technical’ section. I quite enjoyed learning about the background work that goes on with artificial intelligence.
Hi team,
I gave Wilbur
I have a sore foot
My ear aches
I have pins and needles in my hand
My tooth fell out
and all were identified as health complaints. Fun!
looks like sentences got mixed up, Sorry!
Hi Mary,
Thanks for your contributions. I deleted your duplicate posts.
I’m not sure if I did this correctly but I typed a few “complaints” into the Ask Something box on the side. I don’t know if that is where I’m supposed to go to “train” Wilbur.
However, in that area he did go 4 out of 5 for health complaints with the fifth being identified as related to the human body! So it looks like he is doing a great job!
I told him, “I have a headache”, “my neck is sore”, “I am feeling very tired”, “I jammed my finger”, and “My arms feel numb.”
This is very cool! I gave 4 complaints “I have a headache”, “My finger is numb”, “I am vomiting”, and “I have diahrea” (yes, spelled incorrectly), and it identified them all as health complaints.
Cool.
I asked 5 questions and it correctly identified them all as health issues.
I asked:
I am exhausted.
I am sleepy,
I have stiff muscles.
I have a neck ache.
And then I wanted to challenge it a bit… so I asked:
I have tinnitus.
And it correctly identified the malady and spelled it correctly and then identified it as a health issue. I was kind of surprised by that.
I entered the following health complaint.
my head hurts
I received the following message:
Unknown error errorid=eea2cc02-09d7-4743-994b-0b4ef3af9170
That’s weird. I’ll try to see if something’s up on the API.ai end of things.
I’ve just checked Wilbur again and it seems to be running properly. It must have been a server issue