Corona Help Bot | Business Insider Germany teams-up with NMA portfolio Startup Spectrm
During the Corona pandemic people have the urge to stay informed — online usage of most news platforms has sharply risen in the last few weeks. Aside from the daily (or in some cases, continuous) updates on everything Corona related, more and more people need access to specific and detailed pieces of information.
The usual answer to that in times of crisis would be to hire staff to offer an phone-based hotline to address the needs of citizens. But since Corona is putting so much pressure on existing systems and procedures, it helps to look beyond the known analog ways and develop new methods to provide useful services.
One obvious solution to the problem of getting people informed, is the combination of chatbots and Artificial Intelligence. Business Insider Germany and the next media accelerator portfolio company Spectrm created a bot for Facebook Messenger.
The messenger bot helps economically struggling employers, employees and self-employed in Germany navigate through help offers and corona government aid during the covid-19 pandemic.
Easy and fast collaboration
Business Insider Editor in Chief and CEO Jakob Wais explains how the idea of the corona help bot was born: “We developed the idea to create a bot which helps people to economically navigate through the corona crisis in our editorial conference.When I approached Spectrm with the idea founder Max Koziolek and his team were all in immediately.” Within four days only, the bot was ready to be implemented.
This is how the bot works
In the facebook messenger the bot navigates employers, employees and self-employed based in Germany through various options for help in times of crises (e.g. emergency funds). Wais emphasizes that the bot can by no means offer legal advice, yet still all the expertise of the Business Insider reporters will be provided and made easy to grasp through it.
Max Koziolek, founder of Spectrm ads: “In times of crisis we all need to stick together and have to find innovative solutions. We at Spectrm are happy we could contribute the tech part to the corona help bot.”
Jakob Wais and Max Koziolek are eager to see the results and reception of their project within the next few days. Do you want to test the bot yourself? Do it here. (For now German only).
About Spectrm
Spectrm is a German founded startup building conversational user experiences for messenger. The team was part of the very first cohort at the next media accelerator and has since then provided its services for over 100 companies worldwide. For instance, on Facebook the startup increases conversion rates of articles through 1-to-1 communication via facebook messenger. Learn more and get in touch here.
About NMA
The next media accelerator (NMA) is an independent Hamburg based accelerator funded by over 30 media outlets in Germany and Austria. NMA invests in early stage media tech startups from Europe, Israel and USA providing innovative solutions to disrupt the media.
Since its foundation in 2015, NMA has successfully built an alumni network of over 69 companies. During the past years a strong international community was created. With several partners on board in USA, Europe and Israel, we aim to expand and strengthen the hub for media innovation in Europe.
