Pilot RCT and Interview Study on an HIV Chatbot in Nigeria

"The chatbot acts as an empathic informational coach, performing three main functions: (1) offering short conversation sessions about key topics on living with HIV; (2) responding to users' ad-hoc questions on HIV; (3) reminding users of medical appointments and drug taking.~The chatbot comprises a conversational system, utilizing WhatsApp for user interaction, with messages routed through the backend Voiceflow. User can access the chatbot system via WhatsApp. That means that they access the chatbot like any other contact in their WhatsApp chat list. The bot incorporates mostly text-based input- and output modalities, and a few images, which are more protective of users' privacy than speech. Concretely, chatbot users interact with the chatbot on WhatsApp by selecting from pre-defined options (buttons) or, in some parts, writing text."