Suwali’s pilot partners offer first impressions
Here’s what the early adopters of Meedan’s new tool have to say about their experience.
Here’s what the early adopters of Meedan’s new tool have to say about their experience.
Our work to build Suwali has taken place in lockstep with a cohort of pilot partners from across the world, spanning the fields of media, journalism, and sexual and reproductive health rights.
We recently sat down with some of these dedicated groups to take a deeper dive into what made them seek out a tool like Suwali, how they intend to use it, and the value they hope to realize from this software.
Here’s what our friends at Epicenter NYC, The Healthy Indian Project, Al Manassa, Omgyno, and The Quint had to say.
Time and again, our partners told us that Suwali was brought to their attention just as they were searching for new opportunities for leveraging AI to better serve their audiences.
“Epicenter has been integrating AI responsibly into its operations and workflows, and the opportunity we have with Suwali enables another touch point to deliver information to our community, especially amid content proliferation and conflicting information,” our friends at Epicenter NYC said.
The Healthy Indian Project shared a similar sentiment. “We had been looking out for a GenAI chatbot that allows our users to engage with our content and get more insights. Suwali came in at the right time with the potential to fulfill the need. Our primary aim in this case is to improve engagement and lead users towards a set of paid content and services,” the organization stated.
As our colleagues at Al Manassa pointed out, this tool could also present a new pathway for growing the media organization’s core asset: audience engagement.
“Having an engaged community is the backbone for our financial sustainability plans. While the website receives 800,000 visits per month, mostly from Egypt, we want to have loyal and engaged users, not just visitors,” they said.
Likewise, The Quint is on a mission to make sure its readers can access the newsroom’s quality reporting in ways that feel natural and organic.
“Suwali fits into this shift,” said a representative from The Quint. “It allows us to repackage our journalism into a more interactive, user-driven experience. Instead of a one-way flow of information, it opens up a two-way interaction where users can query our reporting directly.
Read our Q&A with The Quint’s Abhilash Mallick.
Some of our pilot partners have chosen to roll out their Suwali deployments incrementally, starting in one topic area or language and then expanding into others.
“We are currently testing one content vertical — health — in English. The next step is to extend to another key issue, such as housing or finance, and explicitly into Spanish,” Epicenter NYC said.
As things take off, The Quint is hopeful that Suwali’s features will help members of their audience examine reporting from multiple angles.
“Some might ask about the latest developments in a story but also follow up with questions that dig deeper into the background of a story, its implications, or related events. We also expect queries around past coverage, specific individuals, or ongoing issues,” the newsroom said. “What’s interesting is that the chatbot allows for a more natural flow, so people can ask questions the way they think, rather than how they would search.”
For organizations working in more specialized contexts, the technology could be particularly significant.
“We are hopeful that the bot will create a habit of engagement among our community,” said a representative from Al Manassa. “We hope that it will be able to scrape our 10-year archive and serve our community a fuller picture of the real Egypt we strived to report on, away from government propaganda.”
Suwali’s purpose-built features also represent a new opportunity for Omgyno to push forward for sexual and reproductive health rights in North Africa and Western Asia.
“People want immediate, conversational answers in their own language — not articles to scroll through or clinics to visit. Generic AI tools consistently fail this audience because they lack cultural and contextual grounding and cannot refer users to local resources,” Omygno said. “Suwali is being built to fill that gap — providing instant, accurate, and culturally sensitive sexual and reproductive health information in Arabic, specifically adapted for the Middle East and North Africa. If successful, it extends our reach significantly beyond what our team can deliver manually, making reliable information available at any hour to anyone with a phone.”
Read our Q&A with Omygno’s Doreen Toutikian.
It’s clear that our colleagues believe Suwali has the potential to both enhance how their community members interact with them and also further their ability to create content that serves their audiences.
“We’re interested in what this unlocks for the newsroom,” The Quint explained. “If we can better understand what people are asking, where they’re confused, or what they’re curious about, that can directly inform our editorial decisions.”
Suwali could also help carry some of the weight for overstretched public interest organizations, allowing them to reprioritize their resources and more effectively assist their communities.
“Concretely, we would measure success through the number of unique users interacting with Suwali, the range of topics covered, user satisfaction and accuracy ratings, and the volume of referrals from Suwali to our testing and telehealth services,” Omgyno wrote. “For the organization, a successful deployment would reduce the manual burden on our team for answering individual queries, allowing us to redirect that capacity toward expanding our clinical and partner network. Longer term, we hope Suwali becomes a trusted first point of contact for women in the region who have never previously sought sexual and reproductive health information or services.”
We owe our pilot partners a deep debt of gratitude for sharing their stories and for working closely with us to build a resource that supercharges organizations’ ability to deliver critical information and crowdsource community knowledge.
As our friends at Al Manassa graciously told us, “Working with Meedan is not just doing business that serves our future goals. We are excited to partner with an international organisation that gathers talents from all over the world who share our values and ‘speak’ our local tongue.”
Visit suwali.io to sign up for a free trial or book a demo today.
