Acceptance of Chatbot in government services: An analysis of responses from 1,00,000 actual users of chatbot during covid vaccination drive in West Bengal

Abstract

The objective of this research is to identify key factors influencing the use of chatbot for healthcare services by its actual users. This research uses the relative advantage, ease of  use, perceived usefulness, perceived risk and time to understand user intention to use chatbots for healthcare services. The puzzle of using AI based chatbots for healthcare services needs to be addressed as there are many issues of  delivering healthcare services. Many of the difficulties faced are people’s lack of  knowledge on using a technology for availing healthcare services, literacy, intention to use, awareness, reach etc. This study has focused on the key factors influencing users behavior derived from innovation diffusion theory (IDT) and some factors from technology acceptance model (TAM) as they focus on key usage intentions. This study looks at the user perspective of using a technology driven service such as a Chatbot. A survey method was used to get the responses of the people in using Chatbot. A questionnaire was derived from the user acceptance theory and related theories and modified to suit the need of this research. A total of 100,000 responses were collected on various aspects of using chatbot service for vaccination during Covid-19. More than 1,00,000 people actual users responded. So, their responses can be taken into consideration for designing such future technology driven healthcare administration. This research has come up with the factors that has highly impacted covid vaccination drive during the time when everything was uncertain and health administration was also under extreme pressure to handle such pandemic situations.