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The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has ushered in a transformative era in technology, reshaping industries and revolutionizing the way we live and work. Over the past decade, AI has experienced exponential growth, with advancements in machine learning algorithms, deep neural networks, and big data processing.
According to a recent report, the global AI market is projected to reach a staggering value of $190.61 billion by 2025, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 36.62% from 2018 to 2025. This rapid expansion is fueled by various factors such as the increasing adoption of AI across sectors like healthcare, finance, retail, and manufacturing, as well as the availability of vast amounts of data and advancements in computing power.
The impact of AI is already evident in many aspects of our lives. For instance, virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant have become ubiquitous, with over 3.25 billion voice assistants in use worldwide as of 2021 while OpenAI and Google are battling for supremacy with ChatGPT and Bard.
Moreover, AI-powered technologies are transforming industries. For instance, in healthcare, AI is being utilized for medical diagnosis, drug discovery, and personalized treatment plans. In finance, AI algorithms are used for fraud detection, algorithmic trading, and risk assessment. The growth of AI is also reflected in the rise of autonomous vehicles, with predictions suggesting that by 2030, over 50 million autonomous cars will be on the road.
Closer to home, I have been on the lookout for founders that are using AI to disrupt traditional means of doing things. This is how I met Mark Williams Nkugwa.
Mark is a trained chemical and processing engineer with a degree from Kyambogo University. He is also a software engineer that has been practising for about five years with an affinity for backend systems. But the focus of this conversation is Pysente Technologies, a company that he founded which built a product called NuruNet.
As per a description on LabLab AI, Nuru Net is a chatbot aimed at providing quick and easy access to educational resources for students in Sub-Saharan Africa and Africa as a whole. The chatbot is accessible through WhatsApp and utilises natural language processing to answer questions, provide explanations, and offer summaries of educational materials with a focus on topics such as maths, science, and English. The chatbot also aims to address the issue of teacher shortages by providing an additional resource for students to turn to for academic support.
“NuruNet was born out of a hackathon organized by LabLab AI. But it is something that I had thought about for a long time.” Mark tells me. “In the hackathon, I realised that AI technology had advanced enough for me to build an educational tool that can be customised to give thorough explanations and detailed definitions to a level that any student could understand,” he adds.
The first version of NuruNet was simple, but Mark kept on refining the product as time went on. “Over time, we have fine-tuned the bot so that it can be able to explain even further instead of being conversational. It can now tackle a question from every angle possible to limit the follow-on questions.”
The refinement has brought wanted problems for NuruNet. Their users have grown fast in the last month hitting 1,000. This has increased some of the bills on their side in terms of maintaining the site, but this is a challenge they embrace. Mark is already looking forward to expanding the capabilities of the platform.
“We want to partner with teachers so that they can sell pamphlets in the form of PDFs on the platform. Students should be able to order for them. We also want to provide assisted reading. If a student is reading a pamphlet from our platform, they can copy and paste a section they haven’t understood and the bot will be able to explain.” Mark says bullishly.
NuruNet has incorporated Flutterwave to start charging people to use the bot. Typically, a new user will save the NuruNet Bot Whatsapp number, send a message and then they will be given a week for free as a trial to enjoy the platform. After that week, users will have to pay $4 to use the platform. Since introducing the premium version, Mark has already acquired 20 users (which is just 2% of all total users) even though the vast majority of these are from Nigeria.
“We want to build a truly pan -African product. When a user signs up, we collect some data from them. We ask for their name, country and age. This enables the platform to customize the answers to a particular geographical location and age. So we are not surprised that we are getting premium users from Nigeria even though we are based in Uganda.”
However, as much as NuruNet is using this data to provide customized answers, Mark is aware that people might be sceptical about sharing their data and how it is used. “The data is very secure. We don’t even know the user’s email until they pay because we have to send them receipts. But we are following all the ethics, and we encrypt everything unless they pay.”
Mark isn’t just bullish on his bot, NuruNet but the wider AI industry as well. He believes it can be the key to democratizing so many things in the future, including education. “WhatsApp is by far the most used social media site in Uganda and most African countries. Everyone who has a smartphone has WhatsApp. This may not be the case for other social media sites. And people open their WhatsApp every day. We are making sure that when they open their app, they can learn something by just sending a message.”
He also calls on Ugandans to embrace AI by comparing it to the emergence of computers in the late 90s and early 2000s. “When the personal computer was invented and then went mainstream, a lot of people were worried about computers taking their jobs. This did happen, but computers also created so many new jobs that never existed before. AI will have a similar effect.” he concludes.