unfpa approached tinkerlabs to conceptualise & design an ai-enabled chatbot, with the intention of improving sexual-health awareness amongst adolescents in low-resource regions of india. i helped conduct design-research, and led conversation-design, with a 4-person team.
within 2 months of its launch in madhya-pradesh, 25, 000+ unique adolescents had interacted with it.
through design-research visits to villages in madhya pradesh, we established information-seeking patterns in adolescents — the triggers, sources and outcomes. over time — and with internet-data — we concluded that there were 8 emotional needs that adolescents were trying to meet, by going to unreliable sources for sexual-health queries.
via a technology partner, we understood the technical limitations of whatsapp, and proposed 173 feature, tonal and identity ideas for the chatbot. i then prepared a wizard-of-oz system that enabled human-researchers to process & respond to open-ended text messages, just like an ai-enabled chatbot would in the future.
we then went back to madhya-pradesh, watched adolescents fulfil information-seeking tasks via our wizard-of-oz system, and conducted a semantic-differential-survey to arrive at our final design considerations for the chatbot.
in 2023, unfpa launched the just ask / khulke poocho chatbot, with the madhya-pradesh government.
worked with: devanshi, tanwi, pratyush, sanjana, and sakina (all from tinkerlabs); unfpa & dure technologies.