AWARD YEAR
2017
CATEGORY
Community
GOALS
Refugees and Migrants
KEYWORDS
Chatbot, information
COUNTRY
Norway
DESIGNED BY
Kåre M.S. Solvåg, Ciarán Duffy and Caroline Arvidsson - Refugee Text
WEBSITE
http://www.refugeetext.org
Refugee Text
A chatbot created to help refugees navigate through life
It is hard to know who to trust when you’re a refugee. People and smugglers lie. The armies close the borders. The conduct of the police varies from country to country. Aid organizations are overwhelmed. Rumour is rife and reliable information is hard to find.
In the face of such uncertainty, many refugees look to their smartphones to find out what’s happening. But finding information they can trust is hard.
But one new approach is to automate information via a chatbot, making it easier, in theory, to scale and distribute to new regions or groups, and to create a link between refugees, governments and charities.
Created by three Danish Master’s students Refugee Text enables refugees to access information via a chatbot, via either text messaging or Facebook’s messenger service. Users can use either English and Arabic and there are plans to add Farsi and Dari. The bot asks which country they are in and which country they would like information about,