Frequently asked questions

A turnkey humanitarian chatbot accessible on WhatsApp, a messaging app used by a majority of the population. It brings together five functions: a 24/7 information center, mass message broadcasting, remote surveys and forms, a confidential feedback,complaints and response mechanism, and an early-warning system. Everything is managed from a simple web platform, with no technical skills required.

The SOLIS Bot is built and operated by SOLIDARITÉS INTERNATIONAL, a French humanitarian NGO working in major crises for over 40 years. It is the first solution of its kind carried by an international NGO. First launched in Lebanon in 2020, it is now used by CARE, Terre des Hommes, Nabad for Development and Lebanon Reforestation Initiative.

CARE Lebanon started exactly there, and moved to the SOLIS Bot when volume outgrew it: a WhatsApp Business account cannot track thousands of conversations, broadcast personalised messages at scale, run structured surveys, or trace complaints. The SOLIS Bot centralises all of that, with a dashboard, exports and a complete history.

Yes. people affected by crisis use the service free of charge, around the clock, from their own phone. No download, no account and no fees are necessary.

That is one of the tool's core reasons for existing. The voice module lets people ask their question aloud and receive a spoken answer. Critical content is recorded by local team members, in the community's own languages. For example, the SOLIS Bot in Cameroon is available in Mafa, Shuwa Arabic and French, and in Haitian Creole in Haiti. Partly thanks to this feature, 84% of affected communities find the bot more convenient than traditional hotlines.

WhatsApp requires a smartphone, but the SMS fallback works on basic phones, and PDF documents (illustrated guides, evacuation maps) can be downloaded and read offline. The bot adapts to the devices people actually have.

Five things: (1) answer questions 24/7 through the information center, (2) alert thousands of people in seconds with personalised broadcasts, (3) run surveys (PDMs, assessments) that export to Excel, (4) receive complaints and assistance requests confidentially and traceably, (5) detect weak signals, consultation spikes, converging reports, and notify your teams before the crisis breaks.

All of them. Content is written by your teams in affected communities' languages, text-to-speech (Google Cloud TTS) covers every language, and locally recorded voice notes complement the text. Current deployments run in Arabic, French, English, Ukrainian, Haitian Creole, Mafa and Shuwa Arabic, among others.

Never. The SOLIS Bot runs on a deterministic rule engine: every message received was written and approved by your teams.The SOLIS Bot is based on a accountability principle and, moreover, offers a measurable environmental benefit compared to LLM-based chatbots.

Yes, that is the model proving itself in Lebanon, where CARE, Nabad, LRI, Terre des Hommes and SOLIDARITÉS INTERNATIONAL each run their own bot: They all have a dedicated number, customized content, and complete autonomy. However, the infrastructure and costs are shared. The flat licence structure creates strong economies of scale: doubling the number of users halves the cost per person.

The SOLIS Bot is being actively deployed eight times across four countries: five in Lebanon (CARE, LRI, TDH, Nabad, SOLIDARITÉS INTERNATIONAL Lebanon, the main field site since 2020) and three pilot projects (SOLIDARITÉS INTERNATIONAL Ukraine, SOLIDARITÉS INTERNATIONAL Cameroon, and SOLIDARITÉS INTERNATIONAL Haiti). It can be deployed anywhere affected communities have phones and network coverage.

A first working version can be set up in just two weeks, with four two-hour workshops focusing on scope, content, technical aspects, and testing,. In an emergency, the bot can be up and running the same day. For example, one SOLIDARITÉS INTERNATIONAL team in Lebanon was trained in an hour and collected 700 survey responses within 48 hours. On the other hand, a full pilot with evaluation lasts three months.

Usage costs are very low: €0.02 per WhatsApp broadcast message, under €0.20 per survey response, 10 to 50 times cheaper than field collection. On top sits a flat annual licence, which organisations can share. Over ten months in Lebanon, every euro invested returned the equivalent of 11 to 50 euros of staff time. Contact us for a quote suited to your mission.

Data protection is built in from the scoping phase: The principles of data minimization (collecting only the information strictly necessary), explicit consent, and the exclusion of sensitive data (health, ethnic origin, political opinions), in accordance with the “do no harm” principle, are incorporated from the design phase. Similarly, surveys are anonymized in high-risk contexts, and the retention of phone numbers is limited to two months by default. Every deployment starts with a risk analysis validated by the protection focal point.

Write to solisbot@solidarites.org: our team will answer your questions, arrange a demonstration and support you from scoping to launch. If your situation is urgent, say so, emergency onboarding takes a matter of hours.