bothrs & ML6
YEAR: 2020
WHAT IS Bothrs?
Bothrs is an experience design studio, that helps businesses grow by designing and shipping digital experience. They dribble through adventures by conducting Design Sprints. This entails creating greater teams, amazingly tailored products and stronger organizations. To top this off, they offer great chatbots and conversational design expertise to solve today’s challenges companies are confronted with.
TEST CASE with VRT NWS
What was the problem?
As a national public-service broadcaster, VRT NWS has been in a never-ending battle with false claims, rumors and other fake news. Nowadays, it is a struggle to guarantee correct, informative and trustworthy news, especially in times of COVID-19 where fake news is lurking around every corner.
That is why VRT NWS happily turned to Bothrs to fix and even automate the issue. The match was easily made. Together with Bothrs and ML6, they joined forces to tackle fake news and serve the VRT NWS audience in a better way by providing correct and trustworthy information.
How did we solve it?
Bothrs & ML6 created a chatbot called COVID Buddy. The chatbot is a fact-checking chatbot that helps users with their self-assessment when it comes to fake news. COVID Buddy was integrated into VRT NWS’ Facebook Messenger, which was easily accessible via its Facebook page. It provides personalized suggestions based on the outcome that nudge the user to the right behavior during times of crisis.
What are the results?
Just hours after release, the chatbot had already gathered over 1,000 unique conversations, 200 subscribers of daily or weekly fact-checks, and 175 fact-checking requests. It's clear there's a demand for accurate news and information, and people are waking up to the idea there's a lot of false information flying around.
LEARNINGS
We learned that due to user-generated content, there is much more to curate than thought before. The amount of content for Fact Checkers to oversee is not only limited to content created by journalists and publishers, but the user him or herself is equally if not even more important.
Additionally, fake news is a problem for many companies in different industries. VRT cannot fight this battle alone. We found that a strategic collaboration with other media players is necessary to create a ‘cross media’ Fact Checkers department to battle fake news.
Finally, due to the success of the use case, we decided to align the case with the roadmap of VRT NWS for use of chatbots in the communication strategy.
Go to the website of Bothrs ->
Or go to the website of ML6 ->