Development of a Voice Chatbot for Payment Using Amazon Lex Service with Eyowo as the Payment Platform

Engaging in financial transactions has remained a hassle for the visually impaired due to the lack of technological products to facilitate their financial independence and inclusion. Automated teller machines (ATMs) and online banking applications do not provide any means through which the blind can engage in transactions without the need of a third party in managing their finances. This study aims at building a voice chatbot device that can be used for payment using Amazon Lex Service with Eyowo as the payment platform. The chatbot is built by leveraging on Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in the form of a service called Amazon Lex for configuring the bot with utterances and responses and Lambda Functions to validate the responses while carrying out the transactions by calling the Eyowo Application Programming Interface (API). A Raspberry pi single board computer is utilised as the medium of communication between the user and the chatbot. The Raspberry pi runs a script that collects voice input through a Universal Serial Bus (USB) microphone connected to it, which is sent to the Amazon Lex to be processed using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Then the chatbot sends back a suitable response to the user through the speaker connected to the Raspberry pi. The device brings comfort and security to the visually impaired by providing balance and cash transfers.