State leaders are stressing that the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services is working around the clock to make unemployment benefits available for the hundreds of thousands of Ohioans impacted by COVID-19.

This week, they will add text-to-speech capabilities to be more efficient, introduce voice recognition and bot technology to answer frequently asked questions and add more than 300 people to their staff.

By the end of next week, there will be a virtual call center to speed up wait times, improvements made to the e-application system and launch an online tool for self employed 1099 workers to start the early application process.

New unemployment claims in the state have surpassed 855,000 over the past four weeks.

To put that in perspective, that four week total is more than the 715,000 claims filed during the last two years combined.