BOTLHALE AI
Multi-Lingual Virtual Assistant to Cut through the Digital Divide

When we talk about the digital divide, we usually think about the shortcomings in terms of technological infrastructure. But there is also a huge—yet invisible— language barrier that is constantly widening the gap of people’s access to digital services. Interestingly, like many other setbacks that the global population were confronted with during the COVID-19 pandemic, the linguistic gap in technology consumption also created a major epiphany.

We are all aware of how the pandemic forced people to stay and work from home, accelerating the consumption of digital tools among every age group. This higher adoption of digital tools, in turn, started putting more emphasis on the language barrier in digital tech for non-native English speakers. Today, as global citizens, every individual wants to consume knowledge like the rest of the world, but, at the same time, feel included through the localization of languages. Stepping up to bridge this language gap with emergent technologies, Botlhale AI, came into the picture. Botlhale AI creates multi-lingual conversational bots to help businesses mitigate the language barrier of conversational AI and connect with their customers better. “At Botlhale AI, we are committed to bridging the linguistic divide that people face in the digital era,” states Thapelo Nthite, Co-Founder and CEO of Botlhale AI.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

Interestingly, the inception story of Botlhale AI is deeply root¬ed in the personal experience of Nthite himself. The co-founder narrates that the groundwork of Botlhale AI was laid when his grandmother was seeking help from Nthite to load prepaid airtime on her phone. As the default language of the phone app was in English, Nthite’s grandmother—who only spoke Set¬swana, a native language of Botswana and South Africa—was unable to operate the phone. It did not take Nthite long enough after that to realize that his grandmother was not alone in fac¬ing such linguistic obstacles. Especially in a culturally diverse and multi-lingual country like South Africa, dealing with lan¬guage barriers has become a frequent and familiar problem.

So, Thapelo Nthite, Xolisani Nkwentsha and Sange Maxaku took it upon themselves to address the issue; this eventually led them to establish Botlhale AI. Today, being one of the early proponents of conversational AI in South African languages, Botlhale AI is helping businesses engage their employees and customers in languages that they can understand and trust. In essence, Botlhale AI’s pioneering idea is not only helping the South African population more inclusive in the global digital trends but also promoting global businesses to increase their reach through language localization.

To this end, Botlhale AI has developed a low-code bot builder that allows businesses to build, train, test and launch conversational AI in native African languages. The platform currently supports seven South African languages, namely English, IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, Afrikaans, Sesotho, Setswana, and Sepedi. Additionally, owing to Botlhale AI’s unique automatic speech recognition (ASR), text to speech, and NLP tools, its conversational bot can even differentiate between different dialects of the same language. Businesses can seamlessly use application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect this conversational bot developed on Botlhale AI’s platform with their existing consumer communication channels and other chat applications like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Messenger, to name a few.

At this juncture, Botlhale AI has already gone a step ahead with its low-code bot builder platform and developed a cutting-edge virtual assistant, dubbed as Naledi, for South African banking institutions. “Naledi is not just a stand-alone app. It is an entire toolkit that allows consumers to interact with their banks on WhatsApp or other communication platforms they are already using,” shares Nthite. While Naledi serves as the prime example of what businesses can achieve with Botlhale AI’s low-code bot builder platform, the CEO notes that the platform can also be used to develop other commercial applications like African language learning and subtitle generating solutions, among others; its potential is limitless.

Highlighting the prowess of the company’s conversational AI platform further, Nthite shares the story of a client who had hit a major language barrier when managing a huge volume of customer phone calls and queries. After onboarding with Botlhale AI, the client was able to reduce their support overheads by developing a WhatsApp chatbot. “It not only simplified the job of our client when dealing with their multi-lingual customers but also improved the customer satisfaction rate for our client’s business—a win-win situation for all,” adds Nthite.

Even though Botlhale AI has already established themselves as one of the most trusted conversational AI solution providers in South Africa, they do not want to hang the boots of their ground-breaking innovation just yet. The company is poised to take on more linguistic barriers head-on and routinely enhance its systems. “We have identified 15 African languages that we want to integrate within our software, which will impact the lives of 250 million Africans and the businesses that serve those people,” highlights Nthite. “And simultaneously, we are looking forward to addressing the unemployment issues in South Africa by involving the local youth in our entire endeavor,” concludes the co-founder/ CEO in a thought-provoking tone.