SOS Children’s Villages builds an always-on AI friend for caregivers with Azure Cognitive Services

A quest to help children

In 2019, Ahmed Mihaimeed, Regional ICT Director at SOS Children’s Villages in Africa, took a trip to rural Malawi. He drove four hours on rough roads to a remote village where he met a group of 12 parents gathered under a tree for childcare classes. Through the local teacher, he asked if they’d want training they could access from their phones, and he has never forgotten their reaction.

“I couldn’t understand their words, but their eyes lit up, clearly telling me, ‘Yes, we would like that!’” he remembers. “We wanted to build a digital solution that would be a companion to caregivers and parents, and everyone uses phones, even in the remotest regions.”

As a nonprofit that helps children and families around the world, SOS Children’s Villages believes that every child has the right to grow up in a loving, safe home and that no child should grow up alone. SOS Children’s Villages teaches childcare skills to its caregivers and to parents. When it faced a drop in attendance for in-person classes due to busier lifestyles and COVID-19, the organization wanted to find a new way to help parents and caregivers deliver the healthy, loving care children need.

“We needed a technical solution that could provide training 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” says Mihaimeed.

A caregiver’s digital friend

As a first step, a global team of coworkers and alumni from SOS Children’s Villages took part in a two day "IDEA Dream Session," organized by NetHope and sponsored by Microsoft. The group partnered with teams from Fjord and Accenture and used design-thinking to find new concepts that could better support the learning and training needs of its core care coworkers and caregivers.

From this session came the ideas for what would become Rafiki, SOS Children’s Villages’ new AI-assisted digital companion. Rafiki is the Swahili word for “my friend.” For parents and caregivers of children in need, a friend can make all the difference, and SOS Children’s Villages is that friend for many.

SOS Children’s Villages worked with Microsoft and Avanade—a member of the Microsoft Partner Network—to develop, build, and deploy a customized, mobile, digital assistant platform based on Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services and the Avanade Chatbot Accelerator. The organization already had a long tradition of working with Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and other Microsoft cloud services. The decision to use Azure AI resources just made sense.

Throughout the process, Mihaimeed remained inspired by the memory of the enthusiastic parents he met on his trip to Malawi. He promised himself, “When Rafiki is up and running, I’m going back.”

Building a bot, brick by brick

For Rafiki to be a true companion, it needed to be friendly, easy to use, and support both chat and speech-to-text in multiple languages. SOS Children’s Villages built its bot platform with Cognitive Services because it needed powerful AI and wanted an intelligent digital assistant that was scalable, simple to manage, and easy to update.

“Using Azure Cognitive Services is like working with LEGO bricks,” says Klaus Zuenkler, Conversational AI Architect at Avanade and Technical Architect for Rafiki. “SOS could pick and choose the powerful AI services it needed and combine them in a way to best fit its use case.”

The Rafiki team built their digital assistant using Azure Bot Service and set up a FAQ knowledge base of question-answer pairs using the question answering feature (formerly called QnAMaker) within Azure Cognitive Service for Language, part of Cognitive Services. Then they used Language Understanding (LUIS) to enable Rafiki for more intelligent follow-up dialogues. And they took advantage of the multilingual capabilities so they could scale and add more languages without having to train separate models each time they added a new language. This multilanguage feature simplified the management of Azure resources.

“The question-answer pairs established a strong basis for the content providers,” remarks Florian Edelmaier, Software Development Team Leader at SOS Children’s Villages. “And we could optimize the length of the answers,” he adds. Edelmaier also notes that question answering made the bot training more transparent.

SOS Children’s Villages launched a pilot test in three African countries in September 2021. To help make the implementation a success, the team shared Rafiki’s question answering knowledge base with its country offices in advance, along with an offer to customize the bot’s answers to better support their communities.

Nurturing children, nurturing knowledge

SOS Children’s Villages can now reach more parents and caregivers and provide immediate answers to questions in multiple languages. “It was absolutely the right decision to choose Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Bot Service, and Avanade for this journey,” says Edelmaier. “Together, they fulfilled all our requirements.”

Non-IT staff at SOS Children’s Villages can easily maintain Rafiki’s FAQ knowledge base without using code. They just add information about training and best practices to SharePoint and it’s uploaded automatically to the knowledge base. And the built-in feedback channel, which feeds into an analytics dashboard, makes it easy for the nonprofit to improve the bot over time. The team uses these analytics to fine-tune Rafiki’s responses and identify new high-interest topics to add.

“We’re using Cognitive Services to preserve and nurture knowledge across our organization,” says Mihaimeed.

Having Rafiki to turn to for immediate answers helps parents and caregivers feel more confident. Busy schedules, the cost and difficulty of travel, and COVID-19 no longer stop them from learning. And they can anonymously ask sensitive questions that they might not bring up in person.

“Anger management, drugs, child protection, and similar subjects are not easy things to discuss in some communities,” Mihaimeed notes. “We’re using Cognitive Services to give parents and caregivers a customized, responsive bot that they can use to freely ask their questions and get answers without fear of being judged.”

Looking ahead

In 2022, the organization plans to deploy Rafiki in African countries that speak French and Portuguese, followed by Italy and countries in Latin America. “Already people across SOS Children’s Villages are knocking on the door and saying, ‘Okay guys, we would also like to be part of Rafiki,’” says Mihaimeed. “With Azure Bot Service plus question answering and other Cognitive Services features, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to solving problems for our young people.”

SOS Children’s Villages also hopes to build another knowledge base that targets youth. “We’re using Azure Cognitive Services to help us achieve our goals of helping children and young people grow to be healthy and self-reliant”, reflects Mihaimeed.“We’re helping them grow to be good citizens in their communities and contribute back.”

As for that promise he made to return to rural Malawi? It might be time for another road trip.

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