# Employing a Chatbot for News Dissemination during Crisis: Design, Implementation and Evaluation
## 2 Literature Review
### Employing News Chatbots for Crisis Reporting: The Case of the COVID-19 Pandemic  
Until the early days of 2020, the global societies of the Western world could conceive of a global pandemic scenario only within the framework of a Hollywood movie. The spread of COVID-19 found mankind unprepared to deal with emergency health crisis situations, although, in the previous decade, several countries around the world had confronted lesser health crises, such as the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) pandemic in the early 2000s. The COVID-19 pandemic made clear to the whole world that diseases do not recognize national borders, whereas national health systems--even in the most developed countries--are unable to support an effective response to such crises. In this framework, crisis reporting has become more relevant than ever and in need of more robust and effective practices to fulfil its social-responsibility function: accurate, timely and precise information available to all citizens on practical issues in regard to the global pandemic. As [PERSON] (2005) argues [PERSON] (2005), reporting information \"as fully as its standing as a major public health crisis demands, and reporting it in all its various aspects\" (p.127). However, crisis reporting regarding health issues in the past had to meet these demands in a way that was in accordance with the technological tools available. The technological explosion of Web 3.0 in recent years seems to have weaponized media organizations with the ability to fulfil their social role with a variety of tools. Among these, chatbots offer a practical solution for both audiences and media professionals to deal with a severe global health crisis, provided they are used to fulfil an audience's specific needs and demands. In their study regarding the use of chatbots in crisis situations, [PERSON] et al. (2018) [PERSON] et al. (2018) find that users expect an ideal chatbot to be high performing (fast, efficient and reliable), smart (knowledgeable and accurate in predictions), seamless (easy and smooth) and personable (understands me and is likeable). Their model was based on [PERSON] and [PERSON]'s study (2017) [PERSON] et al. (2017), which compiles a set of quality attributes expected for chatbots classified into six categories: (1) performance, reflecting the ability to deal with unexpected input and the appropriate escalation to humans; (2) functionality, which is related to linguistic accuracy; (3) humanity, referring to humanized interactions; (4) affect, which encompasses enjoyability, politeness and personality traits; (5) ethics and behavior, referring to respecting users' privacy, sensitivity to social concerns and trustworthiness; and (6) accessibility, by detecting users' meaning or intent and responding to social cues. [PERSON] (2016) [PERSON] (2016) states that, as the technology evolves, in the near future, it could become hard to distinguish a chatbot from a human in a conversation. [PERSON] et al. (2005) [PERSON] et al. (2005) argue that having \"humanlike\" behavior can be one of the success criteria in the process of evaluating chatbots. However, in the case of news chatbots, this clear distinction is important, so as to avoid frustration. Design plays a significant role, and, in most cases, it is up to the designer to decide the \"form\" of the chatbot. For example, creating a chatbot by using a \"humanlike\" form can make the application more \"user-friendly\"; however, it can also change user perception of it as \"human or machine\". Overall, embedding human elements in a news chatbot can be identified as an important step toward building trust in the chatbot application and in the sociotechnical initiative as a whole [PERSON] et al. (2018). Looking for further success criteria to evaluate chatbots, [PERSON] (2017) [PERSON] (2017) goes back to the virtual agents' literature from the 1990s, which includes being efficient in responsiveness.