by GIFT NDOLWANE
JOHANNESBURG – ORACLE, the technology organisation, is driving awareness of chatbots for different industries across the continent.

The awareness is held under the aegis of the Chatbot Week Africa, hosted in South Africa (Johannesburg and Cape Town), Mauritius, Kenya, Nigeria (Lagos and Abuja), Senegal, Ivory Coast and Ghana this week until Friday.

Chatbot Week Africa offers a number of demonstrations and real-world examples as well as discussions around the business opportunities that chatbot technology can bring for organisations in each country.

Craig Nel, Mobile and Cognitive Experience (MCX) Leader at Oracle Middle East, Africa and Turkey, said intelligent chatbots will impact companies from a range of industries in a similar way to the rise of mobile devices.

“Business to consumer use cases for chatbots are being seen in retail, financial services, travel and hospitality and even in utilities, for service-related and transactional conversations,” Nel said.

The executive noted technologies such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing and machine learning come to the fore in African countries with their many cultures and languages.

For example, in South Africa there are 11 official languages but a country such as Ghana has more than 250 languages and dialects spoken.

“One way to attract new customers in Africa is through intelligent chatbots that better understand and process customers’ needs, desires and requirements, in a language preferred by the user,” Nel explained.

Oracle is continually improving algorithms around user sentiment, image analysis, language translation, self-learning and behavioural analysis, to simplify chatbot development and enhance users’ experience.

“In Africa, we will soon see chatbots that will add significant value related to ease of use for healthcare and education amongst many others,” Nel said.
– CAJ News