  COVID-19 pandemic elucidated that knowledge systems will be instrumental in
cases where accurate information needs to be communicated to a substantial
group of people with different backgrounds and technological resources.
However, several challenges and obstacles hold back the wide adoption of
virtual assistants by public health departments and organizations. This paper
presents the Instant Expert, an open-source semantic web framework to build and
integrate voice-enabled smart assistants (i.e. chatbots) for any web platform
regardless of the underlying domain and technology. The component allows
non-technical domain experts to effortlessly incorporate an operational
assistant with voice recognition capability into their websites. Instant Expert
is capable of automatically parsing, processing, and modeling Frequently Asked
Questions pages as an information resource as well as communicating with an
external knowledge engine for ontology-powered inference and dynamic data
utilization. The presented framework utilizes advanced web technologies to
ensure reusability and reliability, and an inference engine for natural
language understanding powered by deep learning and heuristic algorithms. A use
case for creating an informatory assistant for COVID-19 based on the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data is presented to demonstrate the
framework's usage and benefits.
