Enabling African Education

Southampton Science Park based company, Filament AI, has been named a winner in the ‘Futures Forum on Learning: Tools Competition’.

The global competition generated nearly 900 proposals from 55 countries, showcasing innovative ways to accelerate learning recovery and mitigate the educational impact of Covid-19 on students. 18 winning teams are eligible to share over $1.5m in awards to fund tools, technologies, platforms and research projects.

The challenge of providing access to quality education across Africa has been significantly intensified by Covid-19. With children shut out of school, Rising Academies launched its Rising On Air program to deliver free, downloadable, ready-to-air radio scripts, audio and SMS content for five age groups. The program was translated into 12 languages and reached upwards of 12 million children.

With its expertise in AI and machine learning technology, Filament AI will further augment the Rising On Air program by building an AI-powered chatbot and recommendation engine to deliver content directly to users’ phones. Rising on Air Interactive – ‘RORI’ for short – will enable children to boost their language and maths skills by accessing the right curriculum topics for their level, in the right sequence, via both text and audio. This will provide each child with a personalised, dynamic playlist for learning.

Filament AI will also deliver a dedicated management platform, Enterprise Bot Manager, designed to let Rising Academies staff monitor, scale and develop the chatbot itself. Its team will be able to manage the full chatbot lifecycle, access advanced analytics and seamlessly integrate new content.

“The impact of Covid-19 on education, particularly in less developed regions, is a global crisis”, said Colum Elliott-Kelly, Chief Strategy Officer at Filament AI. “Rising Academies has demonstrated the value of alternative content formats and we believe our expertise in enterprise-grade conversational AI can help make high-quality education accessible to even more children that are unable to attend school.”