Join us on May 28: Building a GenAI Sexual and Reproductive Health Chatbot in Senegal and Kenya – Technical and Operational Learnings

The Sandbox Working Group at the NLP-CoP is hosting a conversation about designing, testing, and scaling an AI-powered sexual and reproductive health chatbot on May 28, 2026, at 11am ET, 5pm Harare, 11pm Singapore. We will be joined by Alyssa Young and Xian Ho, from Dimagi.

This session will share learnings from building and deploying an Open Chat Studio-based generative AI chatbot across two countries. Alyssa will walk us through the three main phases of the project alongside monitoring and evaluation considerations at each stage. Don’t miss this session if you’re interested in prompt engineering and language localization, safety and crisis-response workflows, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for curated health content, system observability, and autograding using tools like Langfuse. In this session, Alyssa will also share preliminary findings of their Main Interrupted Time Series (ITS) Study alongside mass rollout.

Get to know our speakers:

Alyssa Young, PhD, is an infectious disease epidemiologist, tropical disease specialist, and health data scientist. She has over 15 years of experience in developing and implementing international infectious disease programs, designing, evaluating, and scaling digital health tools, and conducting clinical and epidemiological research across Africa and the Caribbean. She joined the Dimagi team in October 2025 as a research consultant and program backstop to provide technical and operational support to the Gates Foundation FP Chatbots Project. 

Xian Ho, PhD, is a health and human behavior researcher with over 15 years of experience in the design and evaluation of healthcare technologies. Her work focuses primarily on human-centered design and user experience. She currently serves as a Global Director of Research Strategy at Dimagi, Inc., and has been leading NIH-funded small business innovation research projects and other research initiatives, including the Gates Foundation Chatbots Project, investigating how digital tools – more recently, generative AI – can support various health domains including family planning, substance use recovery, and provider training.