GoluTheBot is a chatbot created by Diyo. Golu will be a friendly bot for people to be with them at the times of happiness and sadness: a trusted friend. Just when we were about to start working on this, Covid-19 happened and fear has spread around the globe including Nepal. Thus, the first mission of Golu will now be to reduce dissemination of misinformation and fake news by providing trusted answers about Covid-19. The Government of Nepal has started call center hotline to answer queries of people. However, with so many queries during the time of panic, manual response is too limited to answer everyone. The AI enabled automated bot will hopefully reduce a large percentage of such queries and redirect only important/difficult questions to call center or those who need follow-up. We are focusing on Nepali language only at the moment as many Nepali people who can speak English are likely to be able to browse properly internet resources and find relevant information. However, Nepali people who don’t speak English are less likely to be fluent in internet browsing and finding right resources. Nevertheless, the majority of them use Facebook, read news and posts being shared over there. The chances of wrong information in such FB posts and shared news are very high. Thus, having someone trusted in FB messenger to ask questions to in the language they know can go a long way in reducing the spread of misinformation. Golu The Bot will therefore focus only on Covid-19 related queries at the moment.
The idea of a trusted friend chatbot in Nepali and its first implementation goes back to one of our start-up’s co-founders. He was a part of an international award winning team for this idea of friendly bot in local languages: sanobot. The first implementation of such a bot was popular among Nepali with more than 10K likes in Facebook. Sanobot’s development in Nepali paused due to other priorities of its creator. However, after a couple of years with a new team in a new start-up with a vision of localizing AI with world-class products in language, speech, vision, gaming and robotics, a next generation of chatbot is emerging in the form of GoluTheBot.