Story By: Alex Cope, Sub Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Asia Wire Report

Chinese robots fitted with Artificial Intelligence have made 28 million phone calls to screen citizens for the coronavirus and they work 100 times faster than their human counterparts.

The robots were created at the Engineering Institute of iFlytech South China AI Research in the district of Nansha in the city of Guangzhou in the Guandong province in South China.

The system of Artificial Intelligence (AI) phone calls has been put in place in 30 different provinces, regions and municipalities throughout China and local media report it made 27.72 million calls between 21st January and 4th March.

The system asks the person on the other end of the line if they have had “symptoms of fever, dry cough or diarrhoea recently” or if they had met anyone from Hubei or other areas suffering from epidemics of the COVID-19 virus.

The system can reportedly make 100,000 calls an hour, depending on server capacity and the number of phone lines, according to the Dean of the Engineering Institute Zhou Guohua.

Zhou says humans can normally make around 100 calls in eight hours, with the AI system covering over 100 times more in the same time.

Mainland China has suffered 80,735 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 3,119 confirmed deaths.

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