Alicante (EFE).- ‘Sara’ is the name of a sophisticated virtual digital assistant (‘chatbot’) created by a Spanish technology company that has been selected by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to help women , girls and adolescents victims of sexist violence in half a dozen Caribbean countries.
This free digital assistant based on Artificial Intelligence aims to detect situations of abuse and guide victims in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and the Dominican Republic with useful and quality information from each country in terms of services social and support services, legal advice and also useful services, such as helplines and emergency telephone numbers.
Among the questions posed to Sara by the users who bring up an alleged mistreatment are whether a victim of gender violence can leave home, if they have the right to a lawyer suffering from one of these episodes, what to do if they are subjected to abuse at home, job or what to answer when the couple demands the passwords or password.
An Alicante chatbot
Sara has been created by the Alicante start-up 1MillionBot, whose executive director, Celia Sánchez, has explained to EFE that a part of the women are not aware that they suffer gender violence and that there are others who are afraid of going to the doctor or to a social worker to express the situations they suffer, so the anonymity offered by the chatbot is an “ally” that “helps to break the barrier of isolation and facilitates the first step on the road to getting help.”
“With an anonymous machine, there is not that possible feeling of shame or fear, and you feel more able to share your doubts.” Thus, the victim easily accesses quality information without leaving a trace on the computer so that, first of all, they are aware that they are being abused and then receive guidance on the steps to take.
Different languages
1MillionBot won the United Nations tender for this project in 2021, which is accessible through the web address ‘chatbotsara.org’ and which uses its own language variants in each of the countries to offer close treatment, according to the director of Company production, Raquel Pomares.
This virtual tool is “trained” by experts from the six countries chosen to ensure that the information responds to the context and language of each place, so that in practice “chatting with Sara is as easy as chatting with friends on any platform ”.
confidentiality
Sara works online, without the need to download or install anything on the phone or computer, and also does not store personal data and keeps the conversation confidential by deleting it after closing the chat, thus generating greater confidence with respect to other service services traditional websites.
1MillionBot was founded by the former rector of the University of Alicante Andrés Pedreño in the Torre Juana technological space and has developed several conversational chatbots in recent years that are used by academic institutions and town halls to offer information to their communities, including ‘Carina’, a successful virtual assistant in Spanish who reported the covid-19 outbreak during the health pandemic.
One of the latest projects is ‘Mentor’, a conversational interface designed by Constanza Casquet to, through the assistant ‘Emi’, encourage social interaction among elderly people at risk of loneliness. EFE