Tracking suspected cases of COVID-19 is crucial to suppressing the spread of COVID-19 pandemic. Active monitoring and proactive inspection are indispensable to mitigate COVID-19 spread, though these require considerable social and economic expense. To address this issue, we introduce CareCall, a call-based dialog agent which is deployed for active monitoring in Korea and Japan. We describe our system with a case study with statistics to show how the system works. Finally, we discuss a simple idea which uses CareCall to support proactive inspection.

CareCall asks polar questions to monitored subjects, and they need to answer simply'yes' or'no' to the questions. Most of the monitored subjects could easily interact with the voice agent of CareCall. However, since older people tended to respond more freely, it was difficult for the dialog system to classify the utterances of older people. This is a challenging technology issue we need to tackle. Firstly, a voice-based dialog system is required to be able to understand unexpected type of user utterances. Therefore NLU module could be crucial in this voice-based interface.