Facebook has announced the winning and runner up bots for the Middle East and Africa Bots for Messenger Challenge. The top performing entries were selected from among 60 shortlisted projects announced on May 16 by the judges.
The overall 6 winners and 6 runner up bots were selected as the most innovative bots on Messenger in the Middle East and Africa across three categories – Gaming and Entertainment, Productivity and Utility and Social Good.
Among the winners are 2 entries from Kenya – that is Bride.ly Buzz and MyTichaa.
Below are the winners in the various categories:
Sub-Saharan Africa
Gaming and Entertainment
Winner: Senegal: Wobot Multilingual Words Games
WOBOT is a gamified chatbot using famous games to test and increase a player’s vocabulary, and can be played alone or with remote friends. Currently offered in French and English, WOBOT has aspirations to grow into new languages.
Runner Up: Nigeria: Laide Bot
Laide is an assistant to help buy airtime, order food, and buy movie and event tickets. For movies, users can view descriptions and trailers before buying tickets. For food, review menus and order food. All payments are currently handled by a PCI DSS (payment card industry data security standard) certified platform called Paystack.
Productivity and Utility
Winner: Ethiopia: LangBot
LangBot is a gamified language learning service, where users earn points, badges, level up and compete to get on the leaderboard by learning. Subscribe to daily reminders, review words using a spaced repetition algorithm, translate sentences, and chat with a bot to practice any language. LangBot currently teaches French, but the chat extension can translate to and from 15 languages.
Runner Up: Kenya: BridelyBuzz
Bride.ly Buzz is a wedding planning bot that assists it users to successfully plan their wedding by providing them with various tools to make the planning process smooth, such as a calendar, 12 month checklist, bridal party management, vendor management, guest list management, wedding trends, and vendor suggestions.
Social Good
Winner: Kenya: MyTichaa
MyTichaa is a fun, digital tutor to help students revise for final exams by doing interactive quizzes. Verified teachers can submit and curate questions as well.
Runner Up: Nigeria: Hyper-cv
Hyper-cv allows users to create résumés quickly and effectively. A user can draw information from their social media account, Linkedin and Facebook, to quickly generate their résumé. Users can also manually edit a résumé. Once completed, résumés can be downloaded as pdf files to share.
Middle East and North Africa
Gaming and Entertainment
Winner: Morocco: Trivoxx
Trivoxx is a trivia game to test a user’s knowledge on three categories: Sports, Science, and Cities. Users can share trivia games with friends and see their top scores against other players. Available in Arabic, French and English.
Winner: Egypt: Mastermind Games Bot
Mastermind Games Bot is a collection of six interactive games to solve codes based on various combinations of logic and memory. Every time a user guesses the correct code, a cave safe will open to obtain a diamond. Users can share games with their friends as they vie for the top scores and unlock achievements.
Productivity and Utility
Winner: Egypt: Mr. Ink
Mr. Ink is a book consultant bot where users can share a book title or a photo of a book cover, and Mr. Ink will return its description, author, rating, and reviews.
Winner: Jordan: Evii (Heroes Burgers & Wings)
With Evii, customers can open up the restaurant’s Facebook page and order food to their homes or for priority pick up simply by chatting with their bot. Already live with five businesses, they offer a bot-as-a-service for conversational commerce. The goal is to grow these bots into a full pack of automated tools to help businesses sell with the help of artificial intelligence.
Social Good
Winner: Egypt: MathHook
MathHook brings math into everyone’s lives! Users can find solutions to single and sophisticated math problems; learn how to type problems in latex; and search for math courses from the kindergarten to college levels via a database of 3000+ YouTube videos such as numberphile, Khan Academy, etc. MathHook also creates a community for teachers and students to chat 1:1 via whisper or group chat by sending images and videos of math problems to solve.
Runner Up: Egypt: Adam (9 months)
Adam (9 months) aims to create community for pregnant women via tools and guidance, and safe communication channels between community members. Adam utilizes additional features such as location services to let users search for nearby pregnancy care, baby or maternity places. It also has an analytics tool to log user actions in custom events with custom parameters to better understand community perspectives. Users can also view name suggestions, chat about what is going in their hospital bags, and connect wth other mothers in the community without sharing any personal data.
Kenya had 6 entries shortlisted in the list of 60 finalists announced in mid May.
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