Why Whatsapp chatbots are rising in popularity in southern Africa

The rise in popularity of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s synthetic intelligence-powered conversational chatbot, has introduced a lot consideration to the capabilities of chatbots.

Previously relegated to assistants on enterprise web sites, ChatGPT has proven that chatbots can do way more. One space which is exhibiting the large potential of chatbots is WhatsApp.

Whatsapp is indubitably the preferred app on the continent, a title it has achieved as a result of its low knowledge utilization and skill to be supported even on the most affordable smartphones.

In South Africa, the pattern is not any completely different. According to statistics, as of 2020, 96% of web customers in the nation use WhatsApp, making the channel the preferred social media platform in South Africa. With 23 million customers in 2021, it’s predicted that person numbers will hit almost 28 million by 2026.

It is this mix of things which have made some builders in the area gravitate in direction of creating WhatsApp chatbots as an alternative of, say, cellular apps. The pattern has seen a few attention-grabbing use instances being put into the market.

TechCabal spoke to builders of 4 of those chatbots to seek out out extra about their determination to construct them, the traction they’ve garnered, their makes use of instances and way more.

Fivvo Pay

Fivvo Pay is a chatbot commerce resolution that permits entrepreneurs to promote and market their companies to ever-growing customers on messaging platforms. The service seeks to automate the gross sales course of for township companies. 

“We’ve been operational for close to a year and up to date, we’ve transacted a volume of transactions amounting to over R700,000,” mentioned Bruce Mkhaliphi, founding father of Fivvio Pay.

The chatbot has the flexibility to combine with Shopify, permitting retailer house owners to seamlessly avail their retailer stock on Whatsapp via a easy plugin. To tackle the problem of creating deliveries in townships, the place final mile supply logistics generally is a nightmare, Fivvo Pay has partnered with Uber to simplify this course of.

“To address the delivery problem, what we had to do, with every township that we go to, would be to get guys who have motorbikes, bicycles, and form a delivery company for them. And then they would run it and then we just use our platform for them to get orders and deliver them. But now we are actually integrated into Uber such that we can scale much more easily across the country,” added Mkhaliphi.

Additionally, Fivvo Pay has built-in ChatGPT to make it simpler for purchasers to put orders via automation or “quick checkout”, offering a lot wanted comfort. However, getting the phrase out concerning the chatbot has confirmed to be a problem for Fivvio Pay.

“Marketing is a big expense for us at the moment, because we are bootstrapping and don’t have any funders or anything like that. To address this challenge, we rely on the merchants to actually market the product to the customers and though the technique has not caught on like wildfire, it has proven to be effective,” mentioned Mkhaliphi.

Meeticks Africa

Meeticks Africa is a collection of three merchandise, all utilising the WhatsApp chatbot API. The first one is an ecommerce market that connects customers to distributors and suppliers. The second product is what Bashanganyi Magwape, co-founder of Meeticks Africa, calls “Google Forms over WhatsApp.”  It permits the creation of a number of varieties over Whatsapp, from buyer help, buyer suggestions, to primary varieties for knowledge entry.

 The third product is an edtech chatbot which delivers bytesized classes to customers. “We call it micro learning. From those bite-sized learnings, we think it’s easier for people to get basic information. We ran an education campaign on plastic waste but it could be education about new products for corporates. It could be used for in-house training. But basically, it’s bite-sized learning and the idea was to not bore people with long lessons when they can take it bit by bit,” added Magwape.

All the merchandise are free for finish customers and Meeticks makes its cash by availing its viewers to potential advertisers, most of whom are corporates.

“So for example, through our edtech platform, we have 1500 users. So we can go to people who provide education services and say, get access to all these users and then we make money from our partners who want to access these users for their service. For example, if a company wants to run a survey, we can allow them to use our users as respondents at a fee,” mentioned Magwape.

With regards to scaling, the problem is getting locals to help with enterprise growth. But in response to Magwape, Meeticks is rising because it’s straightforward to arrange in another nation. 

“All we need is a company and a Whatsapp number, and we are able to hit the ground running immediately.”

Digify Africa

Digify Africa is a youth-led organisation primarily based in Johannesburg that gives free digital expertise to the youth, learners, educators, ladies, and entrepreneurs in South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria.

To present Africans with modern methods of studying, Digify Africa has developed a number of WhatsApp chatbots. Kitso, which suggests data in Setswana, is a WhatsApp studying bot created to equip academics, dad and mom, and learners with the talents to navigate the web area higher. Lesedi, that means gentle in Setswana, gives customers digital expertise comparable to digital advertising, accessing providers on-line, and so forth. According to Digify Africa, Kitso and Lesedi have 300 million messages mixed, and 500,000 learners visiting them.

Digify Africa has additionally launched into the market a complete digital studying resolution delivered by way of WhatsApp chatbot that gives learners with entry to a variety of digital expertise and coaching alternatives utilising ChatGPT

“Digify Africa has a mission of trying to use digital skills and the opportunities in the digital economy to empower mainly young people to try and build their own livelihoods, create jobs, create businesses, and, you know, live a sort of sustainable, dignified life with digital skills, you know, helping them achieve those goals,” mentioned Gavin Weale, founder and CEO of Digify Africa.

The chatbots’ fundamental objective is to attempt to attain younger folks in Africa who could have restricted entry to knowledge and expertise, notably in South Africa, the place knowledge is pricey and younger folks don’t all the time have a laptop computer or a good smartphone for cellular apps.

Digify Africa has quite a few partnerships which it makes use of  to scale their chatbots merchandise. Firstly, they partnered with Meta to create Kitso, which largely teaches web security to younger folks. The chatbot is a part of a programme known as LizweLam, which is about serving to primarily highschool learners to remain secure on-line.

The different partnership is with the Department of Education, to try to attain educators and academics. Through the Lesedi chatbot, the partnership seeks to impart primary digital literacy to anybody in the nation and past.

“We are really trying to scale these chatbots to reach a million learners in South Africa. We are also trying to integrate them into a broader system that we’re building where users can join at a basic level and advance to intermediate training, advanced training, and all the way to some of our other programmes that assist users to get into a job or, freelance career or entrepreneurship,” concluded Weale.

MobileGPT

After graduating with a chemical engineering diploma in 2004 and doing stints in company till 2017, Bertha Kgokong determined to enterprise into software program growth. Through her firm Tati Digital Software Development, she has created quite a few merchandise together with MobileGPT. The chatbot gives a variety of providers, together with producing photos and paperwork comparable to enterprise plans, cowl letters, and resumes.

The service gives a free 24-hour trial interval, after which customers should pay a subscription payment of $20 to make use of it. According to Kgokong, the reception of the chatbot has been nothing in need of wonderful.

“A lot of people that have tried it have just been like, this is amazing. People love the convenience of having such a service on their mobile device. We are getting like a couple of thousand signups a day so I definitely see this growing and becoming a huge service,” she famous.

According to Kgokong, the challenges she has confronted embrace having her accounts banned because of attempting to advertise the product on social media platforms.

“The amount of pushback that we got from platforms when trying to promote the product has been concerning. I have had my accounts suspended on Google, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Twitter when trying to promote MobileGPT. It makes it hard for us to get the message out there about our product,” added Kgokong.

Kgokong additional states that she sees  chatbot expertise like MobileGPT being broadly adopted throughout many industries together with training as folks turn into higher knowledgeable about its upsides.

With synthetic intelligence chatbots gaining traction and changing into extra mainstream, it is going to be attention-grabbing to see how corporations like Fivvo Pay, Meeticks Africa, Digify Africa, and MobileGPT use this momentum to scale.