Rasa Technologies Open Sources Carbon Bot: Free Tool to Help Buy UN-Certified Carbon Offsets to Holiday Travel

Carbon Bot is an intelligent, interactive, and personable contextual assistant that helps determine your carbon footprint and connect you with online sites providing offsets

News provided by

Rasa Technologies, Inc.

Dec 12, 2019, 08:00 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Rasa Technologies, Inc., provider of the standard infrastructure layer for conversational AI, today announced the open source release of Carbon Bot, a research project created by the company to illustrate the power of contextual assistants. Carbon Bot is an interactive assistant deployed on Facebook Messenger and was designed to help climate-conscious individuals planning to travel this holiday season.

Here's how it works: a traveler can send a message to Carbon Bot on Facebook, asking for help finding carbon offsets for their flights. Carbon Bot will ask questions specific to the traveler and suggest projects to donate to in exchange for UN-certified carbon offset credits. Carbon Bot can help travelers with past or future flights 1) determine their carbon footprint and 2) direct them to a site where they can buy offset credits. Carbon Bot can be accessed on Facebook Messenger at https://m.me/CarbonBot.from.Rasa

"For holiday travelers who are concerned about climate change, this is a great service," said Dr. Alan Nichol, co-founder & CTO of Rasa Technologies, Inc. "More and more people are conscious of the carbon emissions caused by flying. By making consumers aware of the tons of carbon they are emitting with each flight, we hope they consider alternative travel methods and/or buying carbon offsets. We've open sourced the assistant and the data used to train the algorithms, so that others can extend and enhance Carbon Bot for other use cases."

Rasa is not alone in addressing the topic of carbon emissions this holiday season. Airlines themselves are responding to consumer pressure, with EasyJet recently pledging to offset the carbon from all its flights.

However, the initial tests with the chatbot showed just how polarized the US is on climate change. "We attracted the first few testers via Facebook ads, and I was shocked to see the amount of abuse the bot received from irate users insisting climate change is a hoax," Nichol said.

The market for global conversational AI is estimated to grow from more than $3 billion in 2018 to a value of more than $27 billion by 2027, according to Data Bridge Market Research. Use cases include applications in enterprise operations, sales & lead gen, internal support, and customer support services, across a variety of industries. Future plans for Carbon Bot include expanding its understanding to other forms of travel, and partnering with international conferences where thousands of people fly in.

About Rasa

Rasa supplies the standard infrastructure for conversational AI, providing the tools required to build better, more resilient contextual assistants. With over 1.5M+ downloads since launch, Rasa Open Source is loved by developers worldwide, with our friendly, fast-growing community learning from each other and working together to make better text- and voice-based AI assistants. Rasa runs in production everywhere from startups to Fortune 500s, and provides the data privacy and security needed to enterprises of every size. Rasa is privately held, with funding from Accel, Basis Set Ventures, and others. The company was founded in 2016 and has offices in San Francisco and Berlin.

Media Contact:
Kasey Byrne
VP, Marketing – Rasa Technologies Inc.
[email protected]
415-903-2388

SOURCE Rasa Technologies, Inc.