Facebook has announced the first three Middle East and North Africa (MENA) winners of its inaugural Bots for Messenger Developer Challenge.
The challenge was launched in February to reward developers who were able to create the most innovative new bots on Messenger. The three winners were selected from 60 finalists from 64 countries across the wider Middle East and Africa region.
The three winners won a prize of $20 000 and three months of Facebook mentorship. In addition, three runner-up teams won $10 000 and three months of Facebook mentorship.
The winners and runners-up in the three challenge categories were:
Gaming and Entertainment
Winner: Trivoxx from Morocco is a bot that allows individuals or a group of friends test their trivia on sports, science and cities in three languages: Arabic, French, and English.
Runner-up: Mastermind Games Bot from Egypt is a collection of five interactive games to solve codes based on various combinations of logic and memory. Every time a user guesses the correct code, a cave safe will open to obtain a diamond. Users can share games with their friends as they vie for the top scores.
Productivity and Utility
Winner: If you like to read books, then you’ll agree that Mr. Ink from Egypt is a deserving winner. Users can either type a book name, or snap a photo of the book cover, to obtain information about the book including its author, rating, and book description.
Runner-up: Evii from Jordan helps customers order and pick up food via its bot.
Social Good
Winner: MathHook from Egypt, is the winner in the Social Good category. It brings maths into everyone’s life by helping users to solve complex math problems and search for maths courses on YouTube across 3 000 maths videos. There’s also a chat function to connect users with teachers or other students to solve maths problems. MathHook is also a student submission to this Challenge.
Runner-up: Adam (9 months) from Egypt aims to create a community for pregnant women via tools and guidance, and safe communication channels between community members. Adam utilises additional features such as location services to let users search for nearby pregnancy care, baby or maternity places. It also has an analytics tool to log user actions in custom events with custom parameters to better understand community perspectives.