4pBot is live!

Good news! After many months of reading, researching, coding, testing and …. ok you get the idea. 4pBot is live.

See? 👇👇👇

A peek behind the curtain.

What is 4pBot you ask? Well read this.

tl;dr:

4pBot is a chatbot for Filipinos on social welfare. It serves as place where people can ask questions, report issues and receive advice privately and securely.

For now, 4pBot addresses 2 key areas that we at Vessels Tech have have identified we might be able to assist with the Filipino social welfare program, known as 4Ps:

1. Payout dates are unreliable and unpredictable
2. Clients don’t speak up about issues because they are embarrassed or afraid they will lose their payments.

A Big Thanks

Firstly, we want to give a massive shout out to DFS Lab for believing in us and funding this project.

We think that this area is full of untapped potential, and we hope this prototype will be a piece in a much larger body of work that will go a long way to lifting the lives others in low income countries.

Secondly, to the whole team at Vessels Tech. We may be small in size (both by measure of personnel, and stature), but we sure make up for it in our work ethic.

What’s next?

Oh we have a long list of nexts, that’s for sure. This is still only version 0.2 of 4pBot, just a public beta release. We’re going to be pursuing feedback on 4pbot’s initial features, and working hard to get another iteration out in the wild before December.

After that, it’s going to be time to pause, reflect, interview and prepare a report on this entire project. We will then (hopefully) be presenting our results to the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation in February, and seeking support to scale up 4Pbot — we’re already in early talks about other applications of 4Pbot beyond just social welfare payments.

Stay tuned for more updates! You can check out more of what we’re working on at Vessels Tech, or on 4PBot’s site here.

If you enjoyed this post, or have any suggestions or questions, let me know in the comments. If you liked this post, give it a ❤️ or a 👏, or whatever you crazy kids are calling it nowadays.