The idea is for each of the cities to have this user service with which to increase tourist interest west of Sofia.
Representatives of the Regional RAISE Youth Center (RYC) youth from Pernik and Radomir, as well as young entrepreneurs from the region participated in the training on May 9. Alex Milchov - an active participant in the entrepreneurship courses of the RYC will be the conductor of the process on a chat bot creation at the local level.
The trainer and mentor of the ambitious young people in this challenge is Elitsa Stoilova, founder of the startup Umni and former general manager of a hotel in the Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Umni.BG was created in 2018 and aims to make the use of conversational artificial intelligence for customer service easy and accessible, to enable businesses to automate customer communication independently by creating digital assistants.
Umni is the creator of Plovdiv City Concierge - the first AI city chatbot in Bulgaria, for the tourists of Plovdiv as the European Capital of Culture, and now we are about to implement something similar to the west of Sofia. The chatbot will be part of the already developed mobile application - https://travelsofiawest.eu/
For this purpose, the training participants were introduced to what a chat bot is, what functionalities it can have and how to create them. An important focus was also how to train the chatbot to meet specific user needs and even upgrade them.
It is expected that in about a month, the region of Pernik will have a chat bot that will guide tourists through the wilds of the unknown beauties west of Sofia.
The RAISE Youth project, implemented by the Center for Development of Sustainable Communities, covers over 500 young people aged between 18 and 29, living in the municipalities of Pernik, Breznik, Trun, Radomir, Zemen and Kovachevtsi, who are not currently involved. Within its framework, various trainings for career and personal development are passed, and the most active 20 participants will be provided with additional training and mentoring assistance to start their own business.
The RAISE Youth project is funded by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA and Norway Grants Fund for Youth Employment.