WhatsApp on Wednesday introduced its partnership with nonprofit Girl Effect to launch synthetic intelligence (AI) based mostly chatbot ‘Bol Behen’ (colloquial Hindi for ‘Speak, Sister’) in India to assist adolescent women and younger girls with issues and queries round common well being and sexual wellbeing. The Hinglish language chatbot is designed to offer content material on matters reminiscent of sexuality, relationship, and reproductive well being in a self-paced chat expertise on the moment messaging app. Users may also ask their very own questions on totally different matters.

Users can entry the Bol Behen chatbot by sending ‘Hi’ to the quantity +91-7304496601 on WhatsApp or by visiting its profile on the Web.

The Facebook-owned messaging service stated the brand new chatbot is focused at adolescent women and younger girls within the Hindi belt of India who sometimes use low-end smartphones with restricted Internet bandwidth.

Using WhatsApp’s framework, Bol Behen is aimed to have an improved understanding of sentiment of the messages it receives to reply to customers extra exactly. It can be projected to succeed in hundreds of thousands of ladies throughout India to reply their well being curiosities and issues and join them to vetted providers sooner or later.

In 2020, Girl Effect first launched the Bol Behen chatbot on Facebook Messenger in India. It is claimed to have scaled as much as attain over 100,000 conversations, with over 1.6 million messages obtained. The chatbot is impressed by Girl Effect’s preliminary chatbot Big Sis that was launched in South Africa to supply non-judgmental recommendation on matters together with sexual well being and relationships.

“WhatsApp’s technology offers us the opportunity to forge closer links between girls and the health services they need, providing content that solves her concerns and encourages her to access healthcare, through connection with curated and vetted providers,” stated Kanishk Kabiraj, Girl Effect Country Lead for India, in a ready assertion. “This will help us to deliver more seamless, personalised healthcare journeys in the future — for example, leading to girls booking appointments, getting reminders and sharing feedback all within Bol Behen.”

Girl Effect works to succeed in women and younger girls throughout Africa and Asia with chatbots, chat reveals, and TV dramas to provide them data about their physique and well being. It additionally runs digital model Chhaa Jaa in India for lower-income, adolescent women throughout the Hindi belt. It was launched in 2019 and is reaching over 10 million women.

Chatbots are rising on WhatsApp to assist its customers with automated, human-like conversations. In the current previous, the app added chatbots to assist customers e-book COVID-19 vaccines, struggle air pollution, and even e-book cab rides.

WhatsApp already has over 400 million customers within the nation that corporations, authorities businesses, and nonprofits can leverage to serve their totally different functions and aims by means of chatbots.