Lessons learnt building a medical chatbot in Python

“To put an accessible and affordable health service in the hands of every person on earth.”

Thats our mission at babylon. Leveraging the powers of AI, python and micro services we took a step towards that vision by building a medical chatbot that we shipped in November last year. In this talk I would like to share with you all the things we learnt in the process.

This talk is our story. Its a story that starts with an idea and meanders through the dark and dangerous land of things like Graph databases, machine learning and async programming in python. The story is far from over, but we have come to a point where we would like to reflect and share with the community all that we have learnt.

More specifically I will cover: - Architecture decisions we made and why we made them - lessons learnt doing async in python at scale - testing chatbots - clinical governance and safety (literally 2 sentences, I promise) - The drawbacks of REST - Why I am glad we did most of it in Python

And then of course some time for questions at the end :)