Ask Sri wants to make sex-ed easy and accessible

Sex education has often been a murky area in Sri Lanka, particularly when it comes to reliable, easily accessible services and information for the youth. Despite the growing need for safe and accurately informative spaces that encourage conversations around sexual and reproductive health, the actual availability is lacking across the board. With the aim of tackling this very problem, the Family Planning Association (FPA) of Sri Lanka has launched what it calls the first sex-ed chatbot in the country, Ask Sri.

Ask Sri for help

Developed with technical assistance from local software company Encyte, this chatbot looks to offer a safe virtual space for anyone with regard to conversations on anything sex-ed-related. This includes topics on adolescence, puberty, contraception, gender and sexuality, and cyber violence, to name a few.

‘Ask Sri’ is a powerful testimonial of the strong potential that lies in AI technologies for social good

Thushara Agus, FPA Executive Director

Ask Sri works as any typical chatbot, you basically type in a query and it gives you an informative answer. The chatbot is available in all three languages English, Sinhala, and Tamil. However, it should be noted that not every question can be answered via Ask Sri. As such, the chatbot is linked to FPA’s Happy Life Clinic where trained counselors will help you via its dedicated WhatsApp line.

The FPA states that it hopes to improve the chatbot’s capability in time, training Sri as more questions get prompted on the service. So ideally a question that might have gone unanswered before may have a valid response in the future.

Commenting on the launch of the chatbot, Youth Technical Advisory Committee Chair Anuki Premachandra, “The incredible team at YTAC – the youth advisory committee of the FPA – realized that Sri Lankan teens and youth needed access to an outlet that provided reliable information on sexual health, given that our school curriculums did not fill this need.”

Marrying tech with education

Of course, this isn’t the first effort at filling the gap of much-needed sex education in the school curriculum. A few years ago, the “අපේ හතේ පොත” (apey hathe potha) book aimed to do something similar. Unfortunately, the book was taken out following vocal resistance from the clergy.

Thankfully, Ask Sri takes the form of a technological offering that ships with its own level of convenience and accessibility for literally anyone. Further, the idea that someone would rather type a sex-ed question to a machine as opposed to talking to an actual person, could potentially mean more meaningful conversations on the subject among the youth.

As FPA Executive Director, Thushara Agus puts it, “Ask Sri is an innovative, engaging, and educational intervention that enables vulnerable and hard-to-reach population groups to talk and learn about sensitive and important issues.”