Hackers Hijack Instagram Accounts Through Meta’s AI Flaw

Meta’s AI-powered Instagram support bot was exploited by hackers, allowing them to hijack accounts—including Barack Obama’s White House account, Sephora, and U.S. Space Force officials—simply by asking the bot to change recovery details. Meta has patched the flaw, but the incident highlights serious risks in using AI for sensitive security functions.

Meta launched its AI-powered Instagram Support Bot in December 2025, with a global rollout expanding in March 2026. It was designed to provide 24/7 account help, including password resets, scam reporting, and privacy management, but was later exploited by hackers due to weak safeguards.

The Instagram Support Bot was meant to simplify account recovery, but its exploitation shows how AI-driven customer support can become an attack surface if not properly safeguarded.

What Happened

• Exploit Method: Hackers tricked Meta’s AI support chatbot into linking a target Instagram account to a new attacker-controlled email.
• Password Reset: Once linked, the bot facilitated a password reset, locking out the legitimate owner.
• Bypassing Safeguards: Attackers used VPNs to spoof locations and bypass fraud detection.
• No Alerts: Victims did not receive SMS, push notifications, or warning emails during the takeover.

High-Profile Accounts Compromised

Account	Impact
Obama-era White House Instagram (@obamawhitehouse)	Defaced with politically inflammatory content
Sephora (official account)	Hijacked and disrupted
U.S. Space Force Chief Master Sergeant John Bentivegna	Personal account compromised
Rare “OG” handles (@hey, @jowo)	Valued at over $1M in underground markets

Why It Matters

• AI Security Risks: The bot had backend privileges but lacked identity verification safeguards.
• Prompt Injection Vulnerability: Attackers exploited natural language prompts to override intended security checks.
• Broader Trend: Similar AI manipulation attacks have occurred elsewhere (e.g., dealership chatbots offering cars for $1).

Meta’s Response

• Patch Released: Meta confirmed the vulnerability was fixed on June 1, 2026.
• Account Recovery: Impacted accounts are being secured, though Meta has not disclosed the total number affected.
• Future Safeguards: Renewed scrutiny over reliance on AI for account recovery and password management.

What Users Should Do

• Enable Two-Factor Authentication (2FA): Still critical for other attack vectors.
• Check Recovery Settings: Verify your email and phone number linked to Instagram.
• Monitor for Alerts: Watch for suspicious login attempts or password reset notifications.
• Report Issues: Use Meta’s official support channels immediately if you suspect compromise.

Key Takeaway

This breach shows that AI-driven customer support systems can become attack surfaces if not properly safeguarded. Meta’s incident is a cautionary tale for all platforms deploying AI in sensitive security workflows.

Haptik’s First-of-its-kind WhatsApp Chatbot Brings Jio True 5G to India

Jio Haptik Technologies Limited, the world’s largest conversational CRM, announced its enablement of Jio’s launch of True 5G services via WhatsApp. Jio’s version of 5G, called stand-alone 5G, is the most advanced and has no dependency on its 4G network. Jio 5G is Live in 236 Indian cities, with more cities, towns and taluks to be added before the end of the year.

WATCH: Demo of Haptik’s WhatsApp chatbot helping people acquire Jio 5G connection

The WhatsApp Assistant, built by Haptik, is the first of its kind in helping Jio and non-Jio users check for 5G compatibility in their locality. Indian citizens can use the bot to request for 5G connections based on their device compatibility and geographic proximity. The bot supports English, Hindi and Marathi languages on WhatsApp.

Haptik Co-founder & CEO Aakrit Vaish said: “Haptik’s WhatsApp chatbot is paramount to helping customers experience 5G and benefit from powerful functionalities such as 5G voice, low levels of latency, edge computing, and network slicing. Our solution aims to cater to the need of 500 million customers who will be migrating to Jio True 5G, at every step starting with eligibility check to lead collection to sim delivery to device shopping and post-sales support.”

The chatbot offers personalization in the form of dynamic menu options with respect to user type (postpaid and prepaid), device, location and outage management via pin code, among others.

The increased mobility and much-improved connection quality of 5G empowers brands to offer more effective brand-customer communications. While 5G will help brands to personalize and streamline customer journeys, powered by AI, customers will also demand more from their digital experiences.

Jio will leverage Haptik’s Proactive Messaging feature to proactively reach and engage with new and existing users about the launch of 5G services to drive the adoption of the revolutionary network technology.

Haptik also recently launched Click-to-Haptik that will help Jio in running ads on Facebook and Instagram to raise awareness about 5G and trigger new conversations with users on WhatsApp to purchase 5G connections.

About Haptik

Haptik is an omnichannel Conversational CRM leader and a Generative AI-first platform helping 500+ global brands deliver memorable customer experiences. Haptik's prominent clients include Jio, Whirlpool, Dream11, Paisabazaar, Disney+, among others. Haptik helps brands scale support operations to handle high customer volumes in less time, offer proactive assistance, drive customer satisfaction, and foster lifelong customer relationships. The company is a Category Leader across platforms including Gartner, G2, Opus Research & more. Haptik won the “Tech Startup of the Year” award in the Artificial Intelligence category, where its decade-long expertise and excellence remain unmatched.

Phillipines' Aboitiz Land Leverages Gurugram-based Amara.ai's Chatbot and Its Data Analytics For An Effective Employee Experience Strategy

Amara.ai, an AI-powered chatbot in a human avatar will communicate with over 270 employees of Philippines based Aboitiz Land to redesign a robust employee engagement strategy.

Driving a positive employee experience remains the main focus for HR leaders. Even after the pandemic has subdued and the workplace setting is getting back to normal, HRs are looking to adopt disciplines to prioritize employees’ well-being, nurture their happiness and skyrocket their productivity levels.

As the world of work is progressing at an unprecedented pace, organizations are finding it imperative to create an environment where employees feel valued and engaged. As part of its effort to help organizations design a transformative employee engagement strategy, Amara.ai – India’s renowned AI-powered chatbot has recently announced yet another partnership with Aboitiz Land – a realty brand that is widely recognized in the Philippines.

Amara.ai, an embodied chatbot powered by Artificial Intelligence advanced employee engagement by predicting, engaging and nurturing employees’ lifecycles to future-proof the business growth. As part of the partnership, Amara.ai will connect with employees at critical touchpoints in their employment lifecycle to gauge their level of psychological investment in the organization and proactively identify those who are highly disengaged or at attrition risk.

Commenting on the partnership idea, Roberto Tatel organisational development manager of Aboitiz Land said, “Prioritising employees’ needs is a vital ingredient for a thriving work environment. We have partnered with Amara.ai with a vision to revamp our long-term employee engagement strategy which will include more than just work-life balance and create more of a supportive environment. Additionally, Amara.ai’s regular check-ins and conversations will help us boost employee recognition, a crucial assessment approach for keeping the employees motivated.”

Amara's AI capability has helped us elevate employee experience by promptly detecting potential disengagement and providing interventions to address concerns among team members. The insights Amara helps us gather lead to meaningful conversations with employees, and enable leaders to approach team engagement in a way that is personalized and intentional. Our shift to conducting employee experience surveys once or twice a year to a more frequent, touchpoints-based employee listening methodology has allowed for a more purposeful engagement strategy

Aboitiz Land has more than 270 employees spread across different territories. Its HR leaders constantly look for the right tools and solutions to stop relying on one-time annual engagement surveys for employee insights, instead, focusing on gathering critical data points at regular intervals. Amara.ai endeavours to enhance employee experience by providing the workforce a humanized platform to raise their voice, opinions and concerns, that otherwise may be missed.

The collaboration enables Aboitiz Land’s all employees to voice out anonymously. Its data-backed approach notifies the company to address the employees’ concerns and fill the gaps in the employee engagement strategy. Within few days of integration, Amara.ai has identified five employees who were disengaged or at risk of attrition.

Talking about integration, Vikas Kakkar, Founder at Amara.ai said, “Anonymity is crucial when it comes to voicing out opinions at the workplace. Integration of Amara.ai as an employee experience strategy can elevate the workplace culture by fostering an environment where employees feel safe, heard and respected. Basis their anonymous conversation, Amara.ai nurtures constructive communication and proactively shares employee’s critical data points to help the company create a positive work environment,” Vikas added.

Amara.ai works on a subscription business model. As part of the plan, the AI-powered chatbot will be programmed to use by every employee at Aboitiz Land. The customized chatbot will drive continuous engagement, promote employee well-being and contribute to employer branding modules.

LPU Online and Hashtag Orange Launch Spoof Campaign on AI Product

LPU Online, one of the leading private universities in India, in collaboration with its marketing partner Hashtag Orange launched a spoof campaign (https://youtube.com/shorts/iA3cvNk-xNA?feature=share) introducing an ingenious AI product - LPU Meet JPT. The campaign aptly titled #MeetSeJeet focused on freeing employees and consumers from the obligations of attending a meeting. The app promised complete automation of the entire process with the help of an “AI Clone” that will mimic the presence of any person in a virtual meeting.

LPU Online as a brand was able to relate with the struggles of meetings and the rising trend of ‘AIfying’ everything as presented by the Marketing partner Hashtag Orange. With its core target audience of working professionals, the brand felt that the problems of meeting is something that largely affects their TG and thus this content will be relatable to them.

Talking about the campaign Ginni Nijhawan, Head of Wing, Centre for Distance and Online Education, LPU, expressed "This activity is a part of their “April Fools’ Day campaign, which is the apt time when we could comfortably take jibes on serious issues, while also ensuring that our messages are put across correctly. When Hashtag Orange came with this campaign idea- we felt it connected to the right audience set and would bring the right kind of recall value. As a brand we wanted to come out and take a shot at something which is trending and yet is not being talked about.”

In continuation, Alka Vij- Director of Hashtag Orange added “As a marketing partner, our role is to create recall value and user connect for our brands. We knew that meetings take a lot of bandwidth of working professionals, while a series of AI apps only confuse them, plus the fact that AI cannot at the end of the day replace everything without human intervention. This resonated well with the consumer and considering the response of the users, we know we hit the right cord."

LPU Meet JPT - #MeetSeJeet campaign was launched with 3 teaser reels that highlighted the problems of both online and offline meetings for working professionals and created a buzz that a solution is coming soon. This was supplemented by a story carousel where they included various polls to understand the opinions of their audience. After this, the final video was launched on the evening of 31st March.

ABOUT About Hashtag Orange:

Incepted in 2018, the Gurugram-based agency, Hashtag Orange, is one of India’s leading digital marketing solutions providers. Founded by Mukesh Vij, Hashtag Orange offers 360-degree digital marketing solutions right from product discovery to sales and services. Hashtag Orange has proven expertise in Social Media, Digital Marketing, Website & App Development, Performance & Influencer Marketing, Online Sales, Brand Marketing, and eCommerce. Having carved a niche for itself among the top digital advertising agencies in India, Hashtag Orange aims to help brands achieve their goals with robust digital marketing solutions.

Haptik Plans to Leverage ChatGPT AI and Generative AI to Benefit Large Enterprises

Jio Haptik Technologies Limited (Haptik), a leader in conversational commerce, has today announced its vision for using Generative AI to build the most human-like bots for enterprises. The announcement comes as the Company launches four beta features that are going to be powered by the latest Generative AI technology.

Speaking on the launch of beta features, Haptik Co-founder & CTO Swapan Rajdev said: “I’m stoked by the potential business opportunity Generative AI brings for enterprises. At Haptik, we have already been using GPT 2 and GPT 3 to augment the bot training data for higher accuracy. ChatGPT uses GPT-3.5 and is a whole different ball game altogether. I’m glad to announce our four upcoming beta launches that can humanize your bot, engaging in free-flowing conversations with your customers without hours of manual training and effort.”

The emergence of GPT-3.5 allows Haptik to improve the accuracy of chatbot’s responses. By leveraging an accurate chatbot that engages in meaningful and human-like conversations, enterprises will be able to offer a better customer experience (CX), improve customer engagement, reduce drop-offs, and ultimately, foster stronger customer relationships.

Haptik said that its new beta features will be made available to all its customers and will be deployed across the platform. It estimates that the features will help enterprises improve their CSAT metric by 10-15% thanks largely to the humanized, more accurate responses of the chatbot. Haptik also mentions that the go-to market and build time will be reduced by at least 30%.

Haptik has made its mark in the conversational commerce space by helping enterprises deliver end-to-end commerce experiences on messaging channels such as WhatsApp, Google Business Messages, Messenger, and others. Thus, Haptik helps enterprises generate direct revenue while optimizing costs and resources.

Generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT have the potential to help Haptik create an extensive array of content and add virtually countless variations of bot responses to enable it to handle a variety of customer queries and offer authentic, meaningful answers.

Haptik said it plans to work with its customers and partners to use Generative AI to drive innovation.

About Haptik

Haptik helps brands acquire, convert, and support users with AI-driven conversational experiences across 20 channels and 100+ languages. With the vision of creating the most compelling conversational commerce platform of the 21st century, Haptik’s Conversational Commerce platform enables brands to design delightful experiences that improve conversion rates across every stage of their customer’s journey. Haptik’s leading clients and partners include KFC, Whirlpool, Starhub, HP, Reliance Jio, CEAT, Disney Hotstar, OLA, and Zurich Insurance among others. The company has been featured as a Category Leader across many platforms including Gartner, G2, Opus Research & more. 

Y-Combinator-backed Writesonic Launches ChatSonic, a Super-Powerful ChatGPT

Battle for AI-powered content generator’s throne begins

• Writesonic is a startup powered by world’s best Startup accelerator Y- Combinator US- S21, headquartered at Delaware, US
• Samanyou Garg is the sole founder
• Raised 2.6M $in Sept 2021 in seed round led by Soma Capital, US and 20 other investors. Planning Series A/B funding to be raised in first quarter of 2023

How ChatSonic Addresses ChatGPT’s Limitations

• ChatSonic is not restricted to 2021 data;
• It offers information on the latest topics with Google-search integration;
• It provides AI image generation through DallE and Stable Diffusion integrations within chat;
• It responds to voice commands like Siri or Alexa do;
• It offers personalised avatars such as math teacher, fitness trainer, etc.;
• ChatSonic’s Chrome extension enables the user to use it’s AI capabilities on any website;
• ChatSonic provides custom templates for various features such as blogs, ads, emails, tweets, etc.; and,
• ChatSonic’s API allows businesses to easily integrate it with their own platforms

The India born, sole founder and creator of Chatsonic Samanyou Garg has recently been creating ripples worldwide with his innovation and creation. Chatsonic is an AI-powered content creation platform that enables people to create content ten times faster than other AI-powered content creation engines. Backed by Y-Combinator, Writesonic is revolutionizing the way organizations use AI to personalize the customer experience and drive engagement. Following in the footsteps of OpenAI's ChatGPT, which has caused a stir in the last two months, ChatSonic is a powerful tool for anyone looking to create engaging content quickly and effortlessly.

ChatGPT is an amazing tool, however users are frequently facing three issues. Firstly, it is unable to generate results on any topic after September 2021. Secondly, it is often down and thirdly it does not provide an API. Writesonic has solved all of these problems by introducing ChatSonic, which is integrated with Google search results and boasts near-zero downtime. Besides this, ChatSonic’s API allows businesses to easily integrate it with their own platform. As a result, many users are now switching from unreliable ChatGPT over to ChatSonic for real-time information on any topic. In addition, users are loving the voice command feature, personalized chat, and Chrome extension that come with ChatSonic.

ChatSonic’s revolutionary Chrome extension is proving to be very helpful for the users as it displays ChatGPT-like responses alongside Google Search results. Additionally, generate any kind of content, be it blog posts, emails, tweets, posts, product descriptions, ads etc., on any website like Gmail, Twitter, LinkedIn and literally every website on the internet.

Samanyou Garg, founder of Writesonic says, "ChatSonic has emerged as the best alternative to ChatGPT, surpassing all of its limitations. In the last 3-4 weeks, ChatSonic’s user base has grown by 10X with hundreds of thousands of users using the platform every week. So far, ChatSonic has generated more than 3 Million pieces of content that is equivalent to more than 1 Billion words."

He further added, “In today's busy world, it can be hard to break the writer's block. That's why we created a platform with a user-friendly interface that works for customers, businesses, organizations, and content creators alike. It allows them to easily create content with minimal human intervention.” Additionally, he announced that the ChatSonic mobile app will be launching on Android and iOS platforms this week.

About Writesonic:

Writesonic is a Y-Combinator backed AI writing and image generation platform that empowers everyone in the world to create any form of content 10X faster. Think of it as Canva for writing, with tools that simplify the process of creating, editing, and publishing SEO-optimized articles, blog posts, ads, landing pages, eCommerce product descriptions, social media posts, and many other forms of content. Founded in 2021 by Samanyou Garg and based in California, Writesonic has received over 10,000+ 5-star reviews on G2, TrustPilot, and Capterra. Additionally, the company is backed by renowned investors like HOF Capital (investors in Uber, Stripe, Alibaba, UiPath, Klarna), Rebel Fund (team includes founders of Instacart, Reddit, and Cruise), Soma Capital (investors in Deel, Rippling, Razorpay, Lattice, coda, Rappi), Broom Ventures, Amino Capital (investors in Zoom, Webflow, Rippling), and some of the best angels from different industries.

Cybersecurity Firm ClearTrust Launches WhatsApp ChatBot called AskMeera to Protect Against Phishing Messages

"Open this link and update your KYC or your xxx bank account will be blocked". How many times we all have received such phishing messages on sms and email from unknown numbers! And unknowingly many also mistakenly believe that the links are sent by their respective banks for updation of personal details and click on those only to fall prey to a virus/ cyber-attack / cyber-crime which costs them money or crashing of phone resulting in loss of data.

Realising the need to prevent these type of phishing messages and to educate the masses ClearTrust has launched Whatsapp ChatBot called AskMeera.

Team of ClearTrust

Explaining about the ChatBot, Founders of ClearTrust, AskMeera, Deepankar Biswas and Raja TN said "All you need to do is every time you get a suspicious message that seems like spam, whatsapp the said message to AskMeera ChatBot and you can confirm if it is a genuine message. What goes behind the Chat bot is of course technology that verifies if the message is actually from the sender and alerts you if it is spurious."

"It is a free service launched as a citizen safety initiative with the objective of cleansing the digital ecosystem and reducing the number of phishing attacks in the country," they further explained.

Post COVID-19, technology took over our lives. While it has its own advantages that we enjoy, it's also an opportunity for fraudsters to commit crimes in the strangest way possible. One such way of committing online fraud is through phishing attacks. This largely involves obtaining personal or financial information from users and employing it to commit cybercrimes, harming the digital goodwill of the individual. There have been reports of fraudsters impersonating government department officials, or bank officials, sending unfaithful messages with malware-attached links, and robbing people off their hard-earned money and reputation across the country.

"Being a WhatsApp ChatBot, it does not require any separate installation. A user must simply save the WhatsApp number and use it to interact in case of receiving suspicious message(s). Any form of text message can be easily verified on the platform. All it takes is a series of 4 steps to shield against phishing attacks," the founders concluded.

How to use AskMeera What's app ChatBot:

Save the WhatsApp number of AskMeera on your device - +91 6361655461

Send a ‘Hi’ to interact

On receiving the reply and selecting the option to verify a message, copy and paste the message you want to verify. 

An instant replay stating the authenticity of the message would be sent by the ChatBot

Confused if any link attached to the message is safe? AskMeera

The ChatBot specializes in detecting the fraudulent nature of messages by taking into account multiple factors associated with them. This includes the following:

Messages creating sense a of urgency

"Dear Customer, Your ATM Card Temporarily Has Been BLOCKED. Because Still You Did not Update According NEW Rules if You want to activate Please call US 78XXXXXX91"

Messages which are too good to be true

"Congrats. You can win Rs. 39,50,000 Lottery with the number 9348XXXX77. Download and verify now. TnC Apply http://k5ec.com/e0bu4Oi2ZI", 

Impersonal messages

"Dear you have passed our interview, wage is 8000 Rs/Day. Please contact to discuss detail: http://wa.me/91XXXXXXXXXX SSBO"

Currently available only in English, the platform shall soon be available in other languages. The platform has resolved more than 1 lakh queries as of November 2022.

About ClearTrust

ClearTrust is a SaaS based Cybersecurity Platform. The company specializes in Phishing intelligence, Bot intelligence and Invalid Traffic (IVT) intelligence which are its core solutions. It provides fraud filtering, detection, and blocking services to ad tech companies and online businesses across the globe.

Global Low-Code No-Code Conversational AI Driven CX Platform Twixor Goes Live With Its 1st Client

The conversational AI driven customer experience platform widens its global reach

Twixor, the global low-code no-code conversational AI driven customer experience platform, has announced that it is now live for its first client in Melbourne, Australia. The technology start-up, which offers conversational AI and automation capabilities, has widened its global reach now that its product is fully integrated and gone live with a disability support services organisation from Down Under.

The company’s Australian disability support services organisation, with Twixor product integration, is now using WhatsApp for employee workforce engagement and responses. For example, available slots are highlighted for its support workers, who then book these slots as per customer’s requirement over the same channel. This was achieved through secure integration with existing RPA systems and back-end reservation systems via APIs.

With Twixor integration, the disability support services organisation is set to reap some significant benefits. The instant conversational facility via WhatsApp reduces the communication back and forth vis-à-vis email, leading to immediate and desired slot filling. This makes for low or minimal friction in communication via an inexpensive 24x7 channel (in contrast to a voice call centre).

Twixor enables AI-powered conversational capabilities for its clients across numerous verticals. Most of the company’s clients choose the popular messaging app WhatsApp as their preferred channel for last mile-communication, but the platform works equally well with any other customer-preferred social messaging channels also.

Commenting on the occasion, Ashok Anand, Founder & CEO, Twixor said, “We are happy to announce that our first partnership in Australia is now live and delivering. Ours is a paperless digital vision with an aim to reduce frictions and bridge the gaps in communication for our clients to impact their bottom line positively. At Twixor, we have planned to introduce many more digital and messaging-led use cases in healthcare covering all stakeholders, including customers, patients, doctors, nurses, and other support workers.”

AI-powered Voice Agent Provider SuperBot Announces the Launch of Dedicated Solution for D2C Brands

• The product is capable of placing 1M+ calls a day, and 10,000+ concurrent calls at a time
• The product helps D2C brands increase their cart abandonment recovery rate by a whopping 23%

SuperBot an intelligent, AI-powered voice agent and a SaaS-based product by PinnacleWorks has announced a variant specifically to cater to the requirements of D2C brands. With the D2C startup space growing exponentially, there is a dire need for finer customer support. In light of the same, the brand has announced the launch of SuperBot’s dedicated version which is capable of taking the overall support experience provided by the businesses a notch up.

The solution unlike any other voice agent available in the market comes with an easy DIY platform. The user can access the platform and simply select the use case, language, and industry and have the product ready for integration with their existing systems. The product is capable of placing 1M+ calls a day, and 10,000+ concurrent calls at a time.

“D2C sector in India is enjoying the healthy base of 700 million internet users and online shopper base of 140 million, which is growing exponentially. With a userbase this huge, it certainly becomes challenging for the brands to serve the customer directly online and maintain the user experience all the time. Understanding the prevailing gap, we decided to offer a unique solution which would be in sync with the sector requirements,” said Mr Sarvagya Mishra, Co-founder, and Director of SuperBot (PinnacleWorks).

The product can offer added support by setting up a 24x7 Helpline at zero training and infrastructure agent, conducting mass-level feedback and survey campaigns, executing feedback and survey campaigns and more. The solution also helps brands increase their cart abandonment recovery rate by a whopping 23%, thus helping them boost their revenue and ensuring new client acquisition and retention. It eventually leads to a handsome RoI as one does not require providing any training or exhausting time in its implementation.

SuperBot is available in 9+ languages including Hindi, English, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Punjabi, etc.

About SuperBot by PinnacleWorks

SuperBot is an intelligent, AI-powered voice agent, by PinnacleWorks which was established in the year 2012. The brand has always focused on bringing a revolution in the tech industry. Following its vision of Always Evolving, PinnacleWorks launched SuperBot in the year 2018, when the concept of an AI-Powered chat agent was new to the Indian Market. It transformed the communication process for 100+ organizations & helped them connect with their users 24x7 over various media including WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. It took the next step towards advancing communication by launching the voice-based communication agent of SuperBot, which is capable of catering to 1M+ inbound/outbound calls a day. With the launch of SuperBot-Voice Agent, the mission stays the same and i.e to revolutionize calling and make businesses use machines for doing the hard work while the humans invest their time in doing the smart work only.

For a Successful Partnership in Choosing a Voicebot Solution, Companies Should Focus on These Most Common Challenges

The pandemic has also accelerated the pace of digital transformation and created an unprecedented wave of new users coming online from smaller towns and tier two and three cities. These new users make up a large population of the country, who are non-English speakers and rely on voice rather than text to communicate.

This has posed a formidable challenge for enterprises, as these users prefer to communicate in their regional languages and dialects. While many companies have decided to use chatbots for customer handling, chatbots come as a deterrent in that they may not deliver the human-like experience that customers have started to expect, and sometimes make demands. To handle rising call volumes, it makes sense for enterprise companies to employ multilingual voicebots and provide the best customer support. 

The Voicebot not only answers queries but can also perform complex tasks such as making recommendations, taking customers through a process, setting up new accounts, etc. Communicating with customers in their regional languages, when things remain unresolved or too complex, are unhindered to human agents. Apart from general, Voicebots can also help companies to analyze customers based on their speech patterns and get useful business insights like customer age, gender, region, dialect, tonality for better targeting.

Amit Gandhi, Founder of NovelVox

Although other companies have different business objectives, they will still need to custom-build the Voicebot to meet the needs of their individual customers. This will allow them to get vital information about their customers in order to serve them better. Therefore, it is important to recognize that deploying Voicebots is not a one-size-fits-all solution, but an ongoing optimization and optimization process that will be the key to a successful deployment, which can have maximum impact long-term, regardless of ROI. I can be immediate.

For a successful partnership in deploying Voicebots, enterprises should focus on these most common challenges:

Cultural Change: Naturally, any enterprise will need time to adapt to a new process and it takes three to six months to adapt to it. It's even more so for the end customer. An enterprise customer will not be familiar with the new way of interacting and may be surprised by suddenly switching to Voicebot, and it may take some time to get comfortable like any new experience. This is especially the case when Voicebot suddenly hooks up with a customer, without having tried and tested it on a small group.

Although it is important to see how quickly you can develop a Contact Center Voicebot, speed of development should not be the only objective. Ideally, Voicebots should be implemented in a phased manner, starting with a smaller audience. This will provide an opportunity to monitor and evaluate each stage against predetermined success criteria and enable rapid improvement before the application is expanded. 

In addition, companies must map out specific use cases, products, and scenarios where they can see Voicebots delivering value quickly and immediately. Lastly, enterprises should see how the customer is responding to it. Most of the time the signals given by the voicebot do not elicit the desired response from the customer. The best way to get the right information from the customer is to monitor, tune and adjust signals, see results and measure success before deciding on the next step.

Turnaround times: No new process introduced in a legacy system will be flawless. This can only be accomplished over time. While technology has a way of adapting rapidly, the only way to optimize a process is by working on customer feedback and fine-tuning the flow. 

In fact, according to a recent study, 82% of customers said they would change products or service providers after a poor experience with a company's customer service department. Hence, the quick turnaround time will make the customer happy as well as help Voicebot to adapt its solutions to suit the needs of the customer. One way to do this is by introducing an assisted plug-and-play or DIY system into the Voicebot system that allows customers not only to replace or flag any issues but also to teach them the craft with relevant suggestions, improvements. Shifts to a more mature self-service model.

Comprehension error: As enterprises adopt Voicebot to handle customer queries, reducing the error rate for speech recognition will be critical to building user trust. There are two types of errors: domain error, which is a knowledge gap in Voicebot understanding domain-specific terms, and user-understanding error, which is an error when Voicebot is not able to understand the input given by the user. This can be due to excessive background noise or too many inputs being given at the same time. 

A domain error can occur due to Voicebot not being updated with an understanding of the business domain. In the first three to six months, the system may encounter many or all of these errors. Fixing multiple issues at once can be difficult and overwhelming for teams on both sides. Therefore, it is best to analyze problems, allow the business to prioritize solutions, and ultimately fine-tune and tune systems to meet customer needs.

This content is written by: Amit Gandhi, Founder of NovelVox

SuperBot Launches Dedicated AI-driven Admission Helpline for Round-the-clock Application Assistance

Mr. Sarvagya Mishra Co-founder & Director, SuperBot PinnacleWorks

Eyeing the admission season, SuperBot launches dedicated AI-driven Admission Helpline for round-the-clock application assistance

Trained for over 1,000 intents, the service comes with language support for 9+ vernaculars such as Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali, and Gujarati and can handle 1 million+ call a day

With the admission season set to kick off in India and abroad soon, SuperBot has launched an AI-driven Admission Helpline to help educational institutes provide round-the-clock support for student queries. Powered by SuperBot’s AI-driven, NLP-powered platform, the solution is designed to handle over 1 million calls per day and provide language support for over 9 vernaculars including Hindi, English, Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali, and Gujarati, amongst others.

The newly launched helpline allows educational institutes to scale up their operations while eliminating query drop-off due to bandwidth issues associated with manual processes. This scaling-up comes without needing to make additional infrastructure/operational expenditure, such as setting up and maintaining call centers or expanding sales departments. Moreover, SuperBot’s AI-based agents come pre-trained on over 1,000 intents, thus eliminating the need to commit to time-intensive, process-intensive training while enabling concurrent call handling for unique queries.

While enabling more personalized and scalable query resolution through cutting-edge tech, SuperBot’s Admission Helpline also allows for human-to-human interactions if need be, allowing callers to request real-time call transfer to human agents.

Speaking on the launch, Mr. Sarvagya Mishra, Co-founder & Director of SuperBot (PinnacleWorks) said, “While educational institutes receive queries throughout the year, the admission season sees an exponential increase in query volumes. To deal with this, educational institutes set up dedicated admission cells and call centers for support with counselling, prospect validation, document processing, and marketing. However, given the sheer volume of interested students and complex operations, managing the scale of incoming calls and keeping track of queries and leads can become challenging.”

He added, “This is where SuperBot’s AI-based Admission Helpline steps in as a game changer. It not only enables institutes to handle over a million calls per day, but it also frees bandwidth by streamlining and automating the repetitive, time-intensive operations so that human agents can focus on areas where their expertise and interventions are needed the most. Educational institutes that deploy our Admission Helpline also benefit from insightful, data-backed, and precision-oriented analytics that enhances process efficiency and improve outcomes.”

SuperBot offers a dedicated suite of services to educational organizations via its rule-based NLU-powered engine. Some of its use-cases include real-time lead verification, inbound counselling, drip marketing, event reminders, and analytics. For more information, log on to https://superbot.works.

About PinnacleWorks

PinnacleWorks established in the year 2012, has always focused on bringing a revolution in the tech industry. It has always focused on coming up with something new which can help businesses to digitally transform and evolve themselves. Following its vision of Always Evolving, PinnacleWorks had launched SuperBot in the year 2018, when the concept of an AI-Powered chat agent was new to the Indian Market. It transformed the communication process for 100+ organizations & helped them connect with their users 24x7 over various media including WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. But it resolved only one segment of communication. The other one stayed intact which was the outbound and the inbound calls. 

The organizations to date utilize 80% of the time of their human agents in just verifying and re-attempting the unattended leads. To cater to this scenario and to help organizations utilize the time of their human counsellors more effectively, SuperBot was evolved from a chat agent to a voice-based communication agent, where it is capable of catering 1M+ inbound/outbound calls a day. With the launch of SuperBot-Voice Agent, the mission stays the same and i.e to revolutionize calling and make businesses use machines for doing the hard work while the humans invest their time in doing the smart work only.

AI-driven Chat Service Company Shares People's Data with Its For-Profit Spin-Off

Crisis Text Line, which is a global not-for-profit organization providing free & 24X7 mental health texting service through confidential crisis intervention via SMS message, has allegedly used and shared the data as a sliced and repackaged version of that information to create and market customer service software.

The non-profit company collects data from its online text conversations with people and uses big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help people cope with traumas such as self-harm, emotional abuse and thoughts of suicide, said a report by Politico, a political journalism company based in the United States and internationally.

According to the report, Crisis Text Line has allegedly shared data with its spin-off called 'Loris.ai', an AI-driven customer service software platform that uses machine-learning to provide companies AI-driven customer conversations with empathy. Customer companies can install Loris.AI as an app into their existing customer service platform such as Zendesk, Salesforce, etc.

Loris.AI is headquartered in New York, U.S. and also has an office in Tel Aviv, Israel. 

The report further said that Loris.AI has pledged to share some of its revenue with Crisis Text Line. Moreover, Crisis Text Line also holds an ownership stake in Loris.AI, and the two entities shared the same CEO for at least a year and a half. The two call their relationship a model for how commercial enterprises can achieve charity-tasks.

Crisis Text Line, however says that any data it shares with Loris.ai, has been wholly “anonymized,” stripped of any details that could be used to identify people who contacted the helpline in distress. Both entities say their goal is to improve the world — in Loris’ case, by making “customer support more human, empathetic, and scalable.”

Notably, Crisis Text Line has got financial backing from some of biggest tech names and VC funds including Reid Hoffman, Melinda Gates, The Ballmer Group, and Omidyar Network.

The services of Crisis Text Line are available 24 hours a day, every day, throughout the United States, Canada, UK, and Ireland.

Further, in a statement on its website, Crisis Text Line, said -"During these past days, we have listened closely to our community’s concerns...We hear you. Crisis Text Line has had an open and public relationship with Loris AI. We understand that you don’t want Crisis Text Line to share any data with Loris, even though the data is handled securely, anonymized and scrubbed of personally identifiable information.” Loris.ai will delete any data it has received from Crisis Text Line.

A recent story cherry-picked and omitted information about our data privacy policies. We want to clarify and fill in facts that were missing so people understand why ethical data privacy is foundational to our work.

A thread 🧵:

— Crisis Text Line (@CrisisTextLine) January 29, 2022

This incidence also raised questions on currently prevalent 'AI Ethics' in businesses. In an ideal "Ethical AI standards", a system of moral principles and techniques intended to inform the development and responsible use of artificial intelligence technology should be practiced.

New Course in Masters in Digital Commerce with Conversational AI Chatbots by Skill-lync

New course offering by Skill-Lync for aspiring chatbot developers and business analysts

Students from any discipline can apply

The skillsets of Chatbot Developers and Business Analysts are in great demand across the industry today

This course has been developed in partnership with Yellow.ai

Chennai, 9th September 2021: Skill-Lync, India’s leading engineering education startup, announces the launch of Masters in Digital Commerce with Conversational AI Chatbots course. This course is specially crafted for aspiring chatbot developers and business analysts. Students from any discipline can apply. The course curriculum consists of Complete Front End Development, Java Programming, Data Structures & Algorithms using Java, Databases, Business Analyst Fundamentals, NodeJS API Development, MongoDB, and Introduction to Yellow Messenger. The course fee for this program is Rs 1,50,000/-.

With the rise in digital commerce driving the need for large scale B2C interactions and round the clock customer support, companies are increasingly adopting AI-based automated solutions to ensure good customer experience and faster turnaround times. This has created the booming demand for Chatbot Developers and Business Analysts who understand the underlying product and have the ability to drive development in-line with business goals. The program is designed to provide this expertise, providing learners with robust technology & business understanding which are must-have traits in any business today.

SuryaNarayanan PaneerSelvam, Co-Founder of Skill-Lync said, “There is an exponential growth of AI & ML technologies in almost every sphere of industry, especially the digital commerce firms. Business analysts and chatbot developers would need to go hand in hand to analyze and redefine how businesses grow and interact with end-users. This course is specially designed for students aspiring to be dynamic business analysts and chatbot developers to plug the gaps between businesses, technology, and human interactions.”

Yellow.ai, previously known as Yellow Messenger, has contributed to the program structure and content to meet the existing business needs in the industry. In view of the learning outcomes and their own talent needs, Yellow.ai would be considering the graduates of this Master’s program for opportunities within the company for the roles of Studio Developers and Business Analysts.

Yellow.ai is a leading CX Automation Platform having 700+ Global Enterprise Customers with 60% of them being from India. They have raised US$78.15 Million in Series-C funding recently, with investors like Sapphire Ventures, Westbridge Capital, and Salesforce Ventures coming on board.

Skill-Lync is an e-learning platform that aims to revolutionize engineering education by bridging the skill gap between students and the industry. Skill-Lync offers industry-relevant, projects-based advanced engineering courses for Mechanical, Automotive, Aerospace, Electrical & Electronics, Instrumentation, Civil & Structural, and Computer Science Engineers.

Skill-Lync is the brainchild of two Mechanical Engineers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who wanted to make a positive impact on engineering education in India. What started as a YouTube channel in 2015, is today a startup with over 500 employees with offices in 3 cities (Chennai, Bangalore, and Hyderabad) and another opening in Pune in September 2021. With more than 700 students joining every month, Skill-Lync has over 6000 active students spanning across 23 countries. Skill-Lync is the first startup from Chennai, India, to be backed by Y-Combinator (W19 Batch).

Appy Pie Unveils Gennext Chatbot: Virtual Assistant and Conversational AI Answer Chatbot

Appy Pie, the leading cloud-based no-code app building platform, has unveiled the future of chatbots with the launch of an all-new Virtual Assistant and Conversational AI-powered Answer Chatbot. The online virtual assistant can be customized as per the need of varied verticals such as banking, healthcare, human resource management, etc.

The online Virtual Assistant and Conversational AI Answer Chatbot can be created using Appy Pie Chatbot in five easy DIY steps. These steps include giving the virtual assistant a name and a personality, attaching brand name, testing the bot, and launching it on the desired platform. These virtual assistants are engineered to read keywords from the text entered by users, understand the context of the question, search for relevant information and deliver it to the users.

“Contrary to the conventional chatbots, these virtual assistants have in-built unique personalities that can be aligned with your brand persona and ethos, effectively humanizing the bot to meet business requirements. Besides, these virtual assistants can be trained using AI & ML to deliver relevant information even if a customer query has typos or is written differently. You can even train these answer bots to pick data from FAQ URLs creating an efficient database. It’s time-saving and fully equipped to let business vie for scalability in an affordable manner,” said Appy Pie co-founder Abhinav Girdhar referring to the revolutionary product.

Businesses that lack the resources to answer their customers’ queries in real-time can use this new offering by Appy Pie as it saves them from keeping customers in limbo for getting desired resolution. In addition, the remote virtual assistants would enable businesses to keep their users engaged round the clock. Virtual Assistant and Conversational AI Answer Chatbots can work uninterrupted and take up repetitive tasks, allowing skilled human resources to work on other complex issues. The CX could be enhanced drastically with the help of this solution.

For more details, kindly visit- https://www.appypie.com/

A Fully Autonomous, AI powered Marine Ship with Its Own 7-Limb Robotic Chatbot Assistant

A team of researchers from the marine research non-profit organization ProMare in technology collaboration with IBM built the world’s first Artificial Intelligence (AI) ship, the ‘Mayflower 400’, which is on a mission to be first full-sized marine craft to cross the Atlantic autonomously, relying on artificial intelligence, robotics and clever computer work to cross 3,000 miles of ocean — without even single sailor on board.

A 15-m-long trimaran (a kind of a yacht) that weighs 9 tons, the Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) is a grass roots initiative led by marine research non-profit ProMare with support from IBM and a global consortium of partners. 

The ship also has its own 7-armed, stowaway octopus chatbot called Artie, which is touted as the world's first AI octopus. Powered by IBM Watson Assistant technology and created in partnership with European start-up Chatbotbay, Artie has been trained to provide information about MAS and its adventures in a lively, and accessible format.

Artie

Users can even help Artie the Octopus fish out surgical masks, cigarette butts and other increasingly common forms of ocean litter from a virtual ocean of facts and data.

Working in tandem with oceanographers and other vessels, MAS provides a flexible, cost-effective and safe option for gathering critical data about the ocean. It can spend long durations at sea, carrying scientific equipment and making its own decisions about how to optimize its route and mission.

The ship has been equipped with a smart captain, an artificial intelligence (AI) technology which can performs a similar role to a human captain. The ship is also installed six high-tech cameras and radars to help the ship learn during its course. The ship, however, is yet to be work at its best under the worst weather conditions.

The so called "AI Captain" can assimilate data from a number of sources, it constantly assesses its route, status and mission, and makes decisions about what to do next. Cameras and computer vision systems scan the horizon for hazards, and streams of meteorological data reveal potentially dangerous storms. Machine learning and automation software ensure that decisions are safe and in-line with collision regulations.

MAS will begin the transatlantic voyage on May 15, 2021 subject to good weather conditions. The initial launch was meant to commemorate the sailing of the original Mayflower that pilgrims from England took to seek a new settlement in America in 1620.

HR Tech Firm Qandle launches ‘Qanbot’ - AI powered HR bot solution

Qandle – an HRMS startup, has launched a new AI HR chat-bot called ‘Qanbot’ that helps automate daily HR tasks of employees. The idea behind the solution is to automate and address the day-to-day general queries of employees on behalf of the HR department. The solution makes it easy to keep the workforce updated on their leave policies, holidays, leave balances and allows them to apply for leaves and time offs, request attendance regularizations, request assets for performing their roles better, and raise helpdesk tickets for issues they are facing.

Through Qanbot, Qandle has added significant convenience to both employees and the HR teams, especially in the current remote working scenario, which makes it difficult to reach out to the HR for small queries. The solution easily reduces the hassle for HR managers’ tasks of recording the employee data, checking, replying, reminding etc.

An employee can simply type or select the query on the bot. A product of cutting- edge technology, QanBot also recognizes voice requests and performs the necessary functions.

“With the launch of Qanbot, we are increasing the overall productivity of the HR department as well as the employees. In organizations with 100 or more employees, HRs have to spend a lot of time addressing day-to-day queries of different employees. Most of these are monotonous and are not the best use of their time. It affects the return on man-hours of the department as well. We are a technology first company and are trying to increase the efficiency of the HR teams through new age solutions,” said Mr. Chayan Mukhopadhyay, Co-founder and CEO of Qandle.

The brand has been working towards automating all the recurrent and manual HR and admin tasks in various organizations to the maximum possible extent. The platform aims to serve over 300 new organizations through the new chat-bot solution.

About Qandle

Qandle, an All-In-One HR tech Platform, launched in 2018, is a young start-up focused on redesigning the HR software from the employees’ perspective. Founded by Chayan Mukhopadhyay (CO-Founder and CEO) and Himanshu Aggarwal (CO-Founder and CTO), Qandle distinguishes itself as a comprehensive solution which covers the entire gamut of HR activities – from hire to retire. Qandle is a modular and extremely configurable solution for HRs looking to deliver the next-generation experience to their employees. Qandle serves over 400 clients spread across 30+ countries.

ConveGenius Uses Conversational AI to Deliver Education to 1.5 Crore Students Across Tier-3 Cities and Rural India

Since May 2020, the social enterprise's chat-based learning platform has reached 1.5 crore students from middle and low-income households in India across 10 mediums of instruction.

The WhatsApp learning sessions have recorded 98% completion rates per week with 80 lakh weekly active users.

New Delhi, 31st March 2021: Crossing another milestone in its stellar growth journey, ConveGenius, an EdTech social enterprise, has scaled its reach to 1.5 crore students in 11 months.Against the backdrop of the pandemic-led technological shift, the social enterprise moved from tablet-based adaptive learning to chatbot-assisted teaching and learning, thus boosting the outreach of its EdTech platform.

Viprav Chaudhary, VP-Operations, ConveGenius, had found that during the onslaught of Covid-19, access to digital devices was a major barrier to education for young students hailing from rural and remote regions in India. "While education shifted to the online medium in the wake of the pandemic, device inequity emerged as a major problem faced by a majority of students beyond tier-1 and tier-2 regions across the country," he commented."We realized that we needed to turn the adversity at hand into an opportunity to resolve this challenge effectively. We decided to transform our existing solution to a parent-based offering, moving from tablets to WhatsApp as the optimal vehicle of education. Parents and their wards were quarantined at home, and children could use their phones to access learning in, and despite, the viral outbreak."

The ConveGenius team adopted the chatbot-based model of learning by integrating WhatsApp APIs into their solution and using the messenger function to deliver small chunks of information and materials to students studying from home. The shift to WhatsApp was inspired by both device (tablet/PC) inequity highlighted by the viral outbreak, as well as the ubiquity of WhatsApp among Indian households across all socioeconomic backgrounds. The app's user-friendly interface further made it the ideal solution to deliver education to quarantined students while also enabling their parents to monitor and participate in the learning progress of their wards.

Since the launch of the chat-based teaching and learning platform inMay 2020, the startup has now scaled up to 1.5 crore students across 10 mediums of instructions, with learning sessions through the WhatsApp platform reaching 98% completion rates weekly. "Integrating WhatsApp into our EdTech solution has unlocked many benefits for not just students but also teachers and parents. Students can retain information better when they are empowered to access learning at their own pace. The conversational AI built into the platform allows us to push each student up personalized pathways of learning. Educators have been creating many educational videos in vernacular languages during the lockdown. The AI-led algorithm is designed to connect students with the most relevant content. Further, teachers have their own version of chatbots which gives them access to student data. This empowers them to map and shape the learning trajectories of their students while assessing their individual learning outcomes," Viprav adds.

Since its inception in 2014, the startup has raised funding worth INR 20 crores from institutional investors including Michael & Susan Dell Foundation (MSDF), Benori Ventures, Enablers, and angels such as Ashish Gupta, Founder, and Trustee, Ashoka University, among others. Its annual revenues for the financial year 2019-20 was INR 18.4 crore. Astride of the pandemic-induced, tech-led transformations in the education sector, the company is looking to reach 4-5 crore students from middle- and low-income households in 2021 as part of its 'EdTech for Naya Bharat (ETNB)' Mission.

About ConveGenius:

ConveGenius is an EdTech social enterprise that has a suite of personalized and adaptive learning solutions. It uses research in the science of learning, AI, and Nudge theory to enhance India's quality of education and bridge learning gaps for the masses. ConveGenius aims to offer superior learning outcomes for K-12. Its products aim to assess the current learning levels and create gamified and personalized learning journeys for every child.

Angel Broking Leads With Industry-First AI Chatbot Integration Into AMP

Adding another feather to its cap, Angel Broking has now become the first BFSI player to deploy a fully-integrated, AI-based chatbot into its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). The latest integration extends superior convenience and flexibility to Angel Broking customers while also improving the user experience on the website. Further to this, it is accessible through the desktop, as well as mobile.

Accelerated Mobile Page, or AMP, is an open-source project by Google that ensures web pages operate optimally in the mobile environment. AMP pages load instantly, respond faster, and are smoother than their predecessors. They limit the usage of HTML/CSS and JavaScripts that affect web performance. What also sets them apart from regular webpages is that Google automatically caches AMP pages to optimize the overall loading time. Hence, such pages improve performance and engagement while also adding to the flexibility and the end-results.

Angel Broking has been at the forefront of innovations in the stockbroking segment as well as the BFSI sector at large. The digital-first broker was the first to introduce services like ‘Trade in 1 Hour’ (now less than 5 minutes), Investment engine ARQ (now ARQ Prime), and UPI Autopay integration for mutual funds. The latest addition will now help investors with their general investment queries and empower them to make informed investment decisions. All of it is while enjoying a better user experience.

Commenting on the development, Mr. Prabhakar Tiwari, Chief Growth Officer, Angel Broking said, “For us at Angel Broking, the experience of our customers holds the highest priority. We have consistently extended the best of services to our customers, something that has added tangible value to first-time investors and seasoned traders alike. Our AI-based Chatbot integration into AMP is a testament to this approach and we are confident that it will add to the overall customer experience. The integration will make our mobile web applications more interactive and engaging.”

Mr. Vinay Agrawal, CEO, Angel Broking said, “Angel Broking has a mobile-first approach to ensure that stock markets are accessible for everyone. Our vision is to amplify retail participation across the country, especially in semi-urban and non-urban regions as they are heavily underserved. To achieve this, investor education plays a pivotal role alongside curated user experiences. We have updated our AMP by adding AI-based Chatbot to the same as it serves both of these objectives. The development has also furthered the legacy of Angel Broking to lead the industry with pioneering services.”

Angel Broking customers can now drive a self-assisted journey at their convenience anywhere, anytime. Prospective customers can also open a Demat account at Angel Broking through an auto-guided process in less than 5 minutes.  

Ministry Invites Proposals for Making UMANG Chatbot "ONE bot" and Conversational AI Platform for e-Governance Services

National e-Governance Division (NeGD) of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India, has invited proposal for appointment of partner agency for developing Conversational AI Platform for delivery of UMANG/Government services.

"The Partner Agency (Bidder) shall design, develop and deploy the complete Conversational AI Platform as per SoW in this RFP and as suggested by NeGD/MeitY. The Partner Agency through this Conversational AI Platform shall provide all software/solution/tools/components etc. required to build, test, train, measure, and manage conversational bots (Chat and Voice)", said the ministry's RFP.

The Conversational AI Platform can be used to develop, deploy and manage multiple bots (Chat and Voice), however, the Partner Agency (Bidder) shall develop, deploy and RFP for Appointment of Partner Agency for - Conversational AI Platform for Delivery of UMANG / Government services and manage ONE bot (Chat and Voice) – UMANG Bot with features and functionalities such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), Text-to-Speech, Advanced Speech Recognition (ASR) among others.

In one of the required functionalities, the NeGD wants UMANG Bot to be able to carry out general conversations such as greetings, small talks, queries about UMANG, integrated departments, services etc.

"Platforms should also have other deep learning capabilities, which can be used by platforms for discovery and recommendation of eligible schemes and services to the users of bots/applications.

"Users should be recommended best-fit schemes and services available in government domain based on his/her profile," the RFP document said.

January 12 is last date for pre-bid conference and January 25 is the last date of bid submission. Bids will open on January 27, evaluation will be done by February 5 and work order is scheduled for the second week of February, according to the document. 

EdTech Startup WeUnlearn’s AI Chatbot ‘Wulu’ on a Mission to Support Over 10,000 Adolescents

Aims to raise Rs. 10 lakh on their ImpactGuru crowdfunding campaign

"There has been an exponential rise in the endeavors to teach children coding and programming. However, are we teaching them to tackle the various changes and challenges that they will have to face as they grow up?", writes Meghna Chaudhary, Co-Founder at WeUnlearn, for a fundraising campaign that is aiming for raising ₹10,00,000 to support over 10,000 adolescents

Based out of Bangalore, WeUnlearn developed a technology solution 'Wulu' --  an interactive AI-based chat-bot enables underserved children to empower themselves and provide a safe space for adolescents (14-17 years) to share their feelings anonymously, ask questions, reach out for help and access resources. 

Wulu is a chatbot hosted on WeUnlearn's website – can be accessed through any device including a smartphone – with the ability to identify beneficiary's problem, categorize them as per risk and customize intervention pathway as per risk.

Interventions modules include -

• Awareness on gender bias & discrimination, implicit & explicit bias
• Training videos on building skills such as negotiation, persuasion, communication to build self-esteem 
• Stories of men and women breaking gender stereotypes
• Fun activities including online games hosted on YouTube 
• Query resolution by counsellors focusing on mental health 

WeUnlearn have so far been able to impact the lives of about 200 students during its initial pilots.

The team at WeUnlearn have taken to crowdfunding on ImpactGuru.com as they now plan to impact at least 10,000 students. The ambition is to scale the solution so that every adolescent gets a fair chance at living up to their full potential.

WeUnlearn Co-Founders Meghna Chaudhury and Pallavi Khare said, 

With the help of your contribution, WULU will be launched in multiple public schools in collaboration with the Government. An entire team will be capacitated and trained to make this solution effective and useful. We require your help and support in building and scaling this solution so that every adolescent gets a fair chance at living up to their full potential. Help us help millions of adolescents in India, who cannot afford the expensive mental healthcare by contributing on our ImpactGuru fundraiser. Help us build a strong, resilient future for India.

WeUnlearn started as the Irrelevant Project in 2016 where Meghna designed and developed feminist books for 8-10-year-old children. In 2018 the name changed to WeUnlearn. 

About the Founders -

Meghna Chaudhury: 8+ years work experience in non-profit, two entrepreneurial ventures - The Irrelevant Project, and WeUnlearn ; Young India Fellow 2015, Tedx talk

Pallavi Khare: 7+ years of work experience in non-profit (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and management consulting (Bain & Company). She is an IIT Delhi alum and is pursuing Masters in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School.

Sopport Here - https://www.impactguru.com/fundraiser/help-we-unlearn