At the ongoing Social Media Week 2019,the United Bank for Africa (UBA) on Monday, February 4th, 2019 unveiled the first Artificial Intelligence Chatbot in Africa. A chatbot is an artificial intelligence which conducts conversation through audio or texts.
SMW is a week long conference that provides ideas, trends, insights and inspiration to help people and businesses understand how to achieve more through story-telling. This year’s conference which kicked-off on February 4th, 2019 has in attendance experts, iconic brands and leaders who are ready to share their ideas and inspiration with a global audience of connected influencers.
This was made known by The Online Group Head, Mr Austin Abolusoro in the Social Media Week tagged “Stories: WIth Great Influence Comes Responsibility”. He made this known during the session titled “Leading Artificial Intelligence In African Financial Services”.
Mr Abolusoro said that the Chatbot named Leo was developed in partnership with some global giants, like Facebook to improve on financial services.
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“Leveraging on technology has many possibilities which are unlimited and UBA has explored it and brought out the AI Chatbot based on our roadmap to enable financial inclusion. Leo is a financial assistant developed with AI technology that has natural language, multi-lingual processing, machine-learning and is available on two most popular social media channels” he said.
Leo is a user-friendly platform that offers lifestyle related activities ranging from weather forecasts to football updates of Premier League clubs. It responds to complaints from customers as regards transactions and with data provided, it would identify the issues and will inform users of the time frame it will take to proffer solutions.
“The prospect for us is to see how we can move as many of our customers that are within that demographics of using social media to the new platform.”
“To achieve this, we need to introduce more features that will attract the customer, and they will opt in by themselves because they are going to see a lot of things that are fun,” he said.
Finally, Abolusoro explained that Leo would also serve as a savings option where it would help a customer to move money from one account to another with ease.
This is a welcoming development in the African financial sector and in recent time, more startups are applying artificial intelligence to businesses in Africa.
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