HelpBangkok

Our engagements with community leaders in the Pom Prap Sattru Phai district found that many urban poor communities – including the elderly – communicate using the LINE app, which is easily and cheaply accessible for many in Thailand. Even those without access to the internet on their own device often rely on a neighbour who has LINE. LINE is the #1 most popular mobile phone application in Thailand, with over 50 million users in a country with a population of 70 million.

Bangkok experiences both a steadily-increasing investment in public social services and a vibrant civil society with active NGO programmes. However, many of the people who need this assistance the most do not know of these resources or where to ask for help. Traditional methods of advertising, such as radio or print media, fail to reach people amid our uncertain world's media noise. Meanwhile, manually-administered public assistance hotlines often lack the capacity to provide every caller with the best help. Thus there is a mismatch between the availability of social services in a neighbourhood and the community’s awareness of them.

HelpBangkok (ช่วยด้วยช่วยเหลือ@กรุงเทพ) is a prototype for a LINE chatbot which aims to connect urban populations with diverse needs to government and NGO programmes that may help them.

The chatbot should be able to provide users with a list of social services available to them in different categories. It should also have a function which allows users to submit their location information via LINE for the detection of their district and subdistrict, followed by the subsequent generation of a list of social services in their area for a particular category.

The prototype, and the chatbot project more generally, are also a policy demo tool. As a demonstration for policymakers and systems integrators, it aims to exhibit the characteristics of ethical data collection and processing. Aside from the prototype itself, the major deliverable of this project is a Product Specification Sheet meant to inform future projects of similar aims and scope.