About
Who is behind ChatAlly?
For now it is only me, Christian, co-founder of the non-profit organization dooiy, that provides step-by-step instructions for good hacks, that make life easier. dooiy’s focus audience are users in underserved communities, i.e. mainly people in slums or rural areas living in extreme poverty.
In this context, for a few reasons, we were looking for an easy way to distribute these instructions via WhatsApp. Only to find out, that this becomes very expensive or complicated, if you want to do it right and according to European data protection laws. Because of lack of money, we chose the difficult route and implemented our own solution that allows us, to (fairly) easily create chatbots from Markdown files. It is currently being prototyped in Mali with an instruction from CoolVeg for a clay pot cooler.
I proposed to the Prototype Fund to enhance this solution and make it free open-source. This is how ChatAlly was born. I am currently in the process of developing the first version of ChatAlly and am looking for contributors and users to help make it a success, so that it can empower small organizations and communities to deploy their own chatbots affordably and GDPR-compliant.
While there may seem to be open-source or free platforms at first glance, the quotas of free offerings are severely limited, and open-source typically only refers to the Software Development Kit (SDK). Data control usually lies with the platform providers. True FOSS alternatives such as frameworks and libraries for chatbots are complex to set up and do not support seamless integration with popular messenger clients.
With ChatAlly, our aim is to bring these components together into a plug-and-play solution that can be easily self-hosted.