Introducing our Chatbot | MVAM: THE BLOG

So when we wanted to delve into using chatbots, it was only natural that we reached out to them. Of course, not everyone we want to survey will have access to a smartphone. A large proportion of people using messaging apps at moment are young, urban, and male, introducing a bias to our surveys. But as smartphone ownership becomes more prevalent this won’t always be the case. This technology is really promising so we want to stay on top of it and see how it can be used for humanitarian purposes. As a first step, we want to use a chatbot to conduct a mobile food security survey on a messaging app. At the moment we are using Telegram because they have an API, which allows developers to easily build customized tools, but we are designing the bot so that it can be used on other messaging apps.