Maldita's award-winning AI assistant, the start of a collaboration based on journalistic excellence and next-generation conversational technology.
After three years as a finalist, Maldita.es wins in 2021 the European Press Prize, the long-awaited and well-deserved award for excellence in journalistic work. And it achieves it in the category of innovation, for putting technology at the service of information.
Maldita is a non-profit organization whose objective is to provide citizens with "journalism to not be fooled". It carries out an exhaustive work of news verification and reports fake and inaccurate contents. Its objective is to combat disinformation.
The COVID19 pandemic brought with it an increase in false information that was Daily transmitted and multiplied through channels such as WhatsApp or social networks. With citizens immersed in a context of misinformation and confusion, Maldita.es, could not cope with queries and alerting of the harmful hoaxes. It needed a digital tool to serve a growing number of citizens who demand truthfulness, and to do it faster and more efficiently.
Wealize helped it achieve its goal with the creation of a conversational AI assistant for WhatsApp. This AI chatbot we developed for Maldita was awarded in 2021 with the European Press Prize for Innovation. Here, we tell you about the fruits of this conversational AI solution specifically designed for these journalists fighting fake news.
In order to combat misinformation and disinformation, Maldita.es launched an AI-enabled whatsapp chatbot. With this, the organization was able to automate the responses to the queries it dealt with on a daily basis. This automation improved the service and released the team of journalists from repetitive tasks. The journalists were thus able to increase their efforts in researching and verifying news, in short, to focus more and better on the citizens.
In one year of operation of the AI chatbot, developed in collaboration with Wealize, Maldita was able to help 26,000 people, 61% of whom use the service on a recurring basis, a clear evidence of success. This high recurrence rate means that users find quality answers to their questions in the interaction with Maldita's AI chatbot.
This chatbot is what we call an intelligent and dynamic chatbot, which beats traditional chatbots. We talked about the differences between AI conversational assistants and traditional chatbots in our article "Conversational AI versus chatbots".
In its first year of operation, Maldita's AI chatbot sent more than 400,000 messages and received 108,000 requests for content to be verified or debunked. According to Whatsapp representatives, this makes it one of the best news verification AI chatbots created for this channel.
With this AI bot, Maldita.es has not only scaled its fact-checking services, but also improved the conditions for journalists, who can now serve the community more effectively and focus their efforts on delivering more value.
Since 2017, Maldita has been part of the International Fact-Checking Network as a signatory to its Code of Principles. In 2018, it joined the European Commission's High Level Expert Group on fake news and disinformation, the only Spanish media in this team.
Credit after credit, following several nominations in recent years, Maldita.es obtains the well-deserved award of the European Press Prize for Innovation. And it does it with the AI chatbot developed by Wealize.
For Wealize, this award is a tribute to teamwork. The product we developed in collaboration with Maldita was based on our conversational AI platform coloqio, which we adapted to the specific needs of the foundation's journalistic work.
Coloqio is a tool that uses AI to manage, automate and scale conversations. We talked about the benefits of using a conversational AI platform to manage and automate communications across multiple messaging channels and languages in "What is a conversational platform and what is it for". There you will discover the advantages of conversational AI.
The collaboration with the Maldita organization has proven to be very positive and, given the good harmony, it has been strengthened with the creation of a joint venture.
Named botalite, in this joint venture we have joined efforts, knowledge and lessons learned to develop a conversational AI tool focused exclusively on fact-checking and news verification that, in addition to offering solutions to improve the service to citizens, is aimed at boosting research work and contributing to the cybersecurity of organizations, companies and governments.
If you want to know in detail about the digital products we can bring to your organization or business in the field of conversational AI, we will be happy to discuss in a discovery session how we can help you, just as we did with Maldita.
Helping the NGO Maldita in its goal of verifying news and contents to combat disinformation with conversational AI technology
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