Nigerians can now verify information on WhatsApp in seconds by simply texting the Dubawa Chatbot to ask whatever questions they may have.
The Chatbot, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool developed by Dubawa, a project of the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID) went live on Monday when it launched in Abuja alongside the Dubawa Audio platform.
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The launch was part of the Journalism, Digital Tech and AI dialogue organised by the CJID which drew speakers and participants from all over the country.
Monsur Hussain, the head of Innovation at the CJID, said the Dubawa Chatbot is developed to give accurate and timely responses to claims or questions.
He said the tool has access to real-time internet data, unlike other AI tools like the ChatGPT and MetaAI, both of which “do not have access to real-time internet data.”
To prove his point, Mr Hussain provided a prompt entered on Thursday in which he asked both the Dubawa AI and MetaAI if Sanusi Lamido had been reinstated as the Emir of Kano. The Dubawa AI answered in the affirmative even though Mr Lamido’s reinstatement was only hours before the prompt. The MetaAI goofed, saying Mr Sanusi was removed in 2020 and has not been reinstated.
Mr Hussein also said the Dubawa Audio platform can monitor radio programmes, listen to them and extract verifiable claims from them.
He said a lot of claims made on the radio are usually undocumented due to the nature of the radio. This makes it difficult to track claims made on it for verification.
“Radio is a mass source of information in Africa. A lot of people listen to the radio daily. But then due to the transient nature of the radio, there’s really no way to keep track of everything that’s going on the radio,” he said
But the Dubawa Audio platform can be programmed to monitor certain radio programmes, transcribe them and extract verifiable claims for fact-checkers.