Edtech Concepts Transforming The Lives Of Africa’s Next Generation

Technology in education has changed over the years. Classroom learning ways have made learning simple. According to a recent stat report, funds are being invested in Edtech sectors of Africa to bring a change in the educational ecosystem. Cape innovation technology initiative has launched an open Edtech innovation cluster in Africa.

Its main aim is to collect the best Edtech startups and companies that’ll help to work on educational problems in Africa. Sparkschools and UNICEF are also doing their bit to change the concepts of learning in Africa. Sparkschools has raised an amount of USD 9, 000,000 for high-quality education in Africa.

Transforming the Educational Setup:

Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are two technologies that are making a way in educational setup. Its revolutionizing simple learning ways through mobiles and tablets in Africa.

Let us look at Edtech Concepts that are Changing the Educational Scene in Africa:

Xander Educational App:

Xander has been specifically developed to suit the educational needs of young African children. It addresses numeric and literacy skills for children who are not able to access mainstream educational apps in Africa. The app is easy to access and it is not so expensive so every young child can use the app for educational purposes. The app is small in size but its reach is great. It can be accessed from any region of Africa and cost wise also it’s cheap. It is designed keeping in mind the young minds. The interface is simple so children can access this educational app on their own.

Snapplify:

Snapplify is a content and media technology company that caters to mobile publishing and content distribution. Its app has a simple reader interface that lets you read large content without any strain on the eyes. It allows children to read, integrate and learn properly.

It also allows reading books on android Smartphones or tablets. The best part is anyone can read from the app at any place. There is no specific access required for reading. It is good to increase the vocabulary power of children. Reading is a good habit that should be inculcated from a young age in children.

Beblocky:

Beblocky uses the AR technology that powers the robot into the real world. Blockybot uses a specific bot type programming that enables the children to stack together all the programming components. The children can stack action, events and different components that’ll help them to develop and learn new skills. The robot combines different features of blocks and actions that make the learning process interactive and fun. Beblocky is a programmable friendly robot that can help children in their learning process. The best part is there is nothing technical, it’s easy to use and the interface is simple.

Wethinkcode:

It is a training program for people who are aged 17 to 35. It caters to training that helps to fill up the tech skill gap of unemployment in Africa. The program is delivered as a learning system that helps students to learn about special skills of employment. It helps them to develop new skills that are future proof. It helps them to get trained for new technologies and updated versions. It is the best route for training and skilled learning. The best part about Wethinkcode is it’s a free training program so students with a low-income group can also get trained for the future and get employment opportunities.

The startups that are Making a Difference:

– Student hub

Hertzy Kabeya started this student-based platform in 2015. This simple E-com platform offers smart technology to educational institutions, students and Government in Africa. It also publishes eBooks with added resources for students to make them learn better. The startup also helps students connect with authors and publishers of the book. It assists students if they are stuck with any subject matter.

– Obami

Obami Founded by Barbara Mallison, this startup is based in Cape Town. It is an online learning and communication platform that brings together teachers, individuals, and students. It provides a unified learning experience to students that help them to understand things in a simplified way. It lets students and teachers discuss new resources and lessons. It helps to connect students globally and that is an advantage of this startup. The interface is inspired by Facebook so it integrates social media style as well. Business Insider also named this startup as the top 20 companies in the world.

Technology Changed Concepts:

Technology has changed the educational prospects of Africa. Through educational apps and startups, students can connect.

This is bringing a promising change in educational technology and is helping students adopt new and innovative ways of learning. The future is great with many startups and educational apps making way for students of Africa.

Edtech concepts help students to grasp and learn easily. Its also making a difference in the lives of children who can’t afford costly studies. Edtech is helping them in each possible way. Edtech is accessible and provides a simple and comprehensive approach. With Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality integrating with Edtech, the future looks bright for students of Africa.

Modernization of technology creates a huge scope for the Education sector among the lives of Africa’s next generation. Parents and Teachers wanting their kids to learn and have fun at the same time – Educational App development and mobile apps are the answer to such requirements.

Let’s Nurture, a leading custom mobile app development company delivers a highly customized On-demand teaching platform with personalized accessible and real-time solutions for our clients in the education industry leveraging custom education app games development.

To get a free quote for your Educational Game App Development requirement, Feel Free to Contact Us now.

The Impact of Artificial intelligence (AI) to the UAE Energy Sector

According to the UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Omar Sultan Al Olama, not only is artificial intelligence reshaping the energy scene on a global scale, but the contribution of AI to the UAE energy sector is going to reach an estimated $2.85 billion by 2020.

Technologies like data analysis, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and Blockchain are all emerging as key components in how the energy sector will be impacted and disrupted. While oil prices have dropped in the last few years, the disruption of these new technologies is going to yield higher returns on efficiency, safety, and security, enabling the country to make faster and more accurate decisions.

How the UAE can Use AI Within this Sector?

• The country will use artificial intelligence, big data, and IoT to improve the operational side of directional drilling and hydraulic fracking. These technologies will help increase how efficient the extraction process of oil is. How? IoT will allow the UAE to control the manufacturing and production process of oil, make smarter decisions around its extraction, and use predictive maintenance in oil fields. Surveying for oil and gas will become much more accurate with the use of sensor technology, ensuring that only optimal regions are utilized.
• The country can also use the Internet of Things to control oil fields, enabling them to get better analytics of what is happening underground. This data can then be used to create forecasts for the future to ensure that all oil and gas that is extracted is produced, stored, and transported in the most efficient way possible. As of right now, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) is using AI technology to unlock reserves of oil that were considered uneconomical before. The CEO of the company expects that this type of technology will allow UAE to become self-sufficient with gas and become a net-exporter of it.

• With Blockchain, every oil barrel can be authenticated and followed from the production line to the delivery point. If an oil barrel ever disappears, it can be traced, ultimately eliminating any “black marketeering”.
• Robots with artificial intelligence will allow the fields to become completely automated, enabling the production process to be optimized and streamlined. Human engineers, scientists, and robots will work in tandem with one another to ensure that the process remains online and as efficient as possible. Unmanned devices like drones can do inspections and surveys in remote areas and perform inefficient asks where human labor would not be ideal. Beyond this, automated shipping of oil and gas will occur with autonomous trucks.
• The use of the digital twins, a 360-degree digital copy of physical assets, will enable workers to detect problems, improve business processes, and reduce down-time. This, in turn, will allow the UAE to develop new opportunities.

While the world continues to move towards renewable energy, the market currently cannot meet all the energy needs required, and as such the growth and demand for oil and gas will continue to expand soon. With this said, the use of Artificial Intelligence in the UAE oil and gas sector, positions the country to become a global leader of AI innovation. According to the UAE Minister of State, the outlook for the energy sector is positive despite the economic slowdown, as the technological revolution continues to grow within the market.

Artificial Intelligence is also becoming popular in retail industry. According to Gartner, by 2020, 85% of customer interactions in retail will be managed by artificial intelligence. There are numerous reasons why Artificial Intelligence can be a trusted solution for retailers.

Let’s Nurture has a wide range of IT solutions to meet your business requirements. If you are a company looking for technology service providers, we can help you to guide you through your prospects. Meet Our Team in UAE (2-9 October 2019) at GITEX Technology Week.

For more details and queries, please get in touch with us.

AI & Machine Learning for Object Identification By Let’s Nurture Team

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is a hot topic in the tech industry. Check out this video – AI & Machine Learning for Object Identification By Team Let’s Nurture.

How Smart Farming Will Answer The Need for Increased Food Production

As the world’s population continues to rise year after year, the area of land available for agriculture is on the decline. According to a Scientific Foresight Study on precision agriculture and the future of farming, the area for agriculture production has decreased by 0.7% since 2013. With the United Nations projecting that there will be 9.7 billion people on Earth by 2050, the agriculture industry will need to increase its productivity by at least 70% in order to keep up with the demand.

In order to do this without placing any burden on the environment and contributing to changes in seasonal events, climate change, and the world’s freshwater supply, the solution at hand is through precision agriculture, also known as “Smart Farming” – leveraging multiple technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence, etc.

What Is Smart Farming and What Is Needed For It?

Precision agriculture or smart farming involves the integration of advanced technologies into existing farm architecture. IoT based solutions and services are in demand now leveraging IoT app development services for Smart farming in order to increase the production quality of agricultural products and the efficiency at which products are produced. Smart farming is considered a management concept or a way to address the challenges that the food industry is experiencing, such as population growth, labor issues, and climate change.

 

Fortunately, just about every aspect of farming can benefit from the technological advancements that our industrial revolution has spurred on. For instance, smart farming will be able to increase the effectiveness of pesticide and fertilizer use in a selective manner, it can provide farmers the ability to monitor individual needs of all animals, it can help prevent disease and increased herd health, and it can even allow farmers to monitor crop health and speed up harvest time. Currently, there are three agricultural technologies that are expected to become the pillars of the industry, autonomous robots, drones or UAVs, and the IoT sensors based farming solutions. Before we jump into these, however, let’s take a look at what is needed for smart farming.

What Do You Need to Get Smart Farming Up and Off the Ground?

As with all innovations, both knowledge and capital is required but more so than anything else, the farmer needs to have the passion and professional skill set in order to work the technologies being implemented. Beyond this, the farm or group of farmers need to be able to have a legal expert on board in order to maneuver through the growing maze of regulations that are being put in place as smart farming becomes popularized. Other than this, smart farming requires capital investment; luckily there are several low-cost options available like using custom mobile application development to track livestock and plant health. The benefit to these low-cost options is that they are easily scalable and generally easy to implement.

Read more on: Cost to Develop IoT Powered Proof of Concept (PoC) Solution for Smart Farming

Three Pillar Technologies Driving Smart Farming

1) Autonomous and Robotic Labor

 

Replacing human labor with automation is a growing trend and with how labor intensive farming is, it makes sense to automate repetitive and standardized tasks. As smart equipment becomes possible, the agriculture sector is going to see things like driverless tractors, precision seeder machines, and automatic smart water irrigation systems that use IoT sensors and data information to get the job done. Beyond this, several robotic prototypes are being tested to navigate through crop fields and perform tasks such as weeding, pest control, and plant maintenance through the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Finally, engineers are currently working on robotic components that will be able to complete sophisticated tasks such as picking fruit off trees and identifying food ripeness.

You may like to Read: IoT based Smart Plant Solution to Ensure Optimum Health

2) Drones for Imaging & Planting

 

With the advancement in imaging technologies, farmers are no longer limited to taking bird’s eye pictures of their farm in visible light nor are they required to only take still photographs. Farmers are now able to take photographs in infrared, hyperspectral imaging, and ultraviolet imaging, not to mention video. In utilizing all of these imaging types, farmers are able to collect more detailed data than ever before, helping them make informed decisions on assessing soil quality, planning out planting locations, and monitoring crop health. When land surveying is done regularly, farmers will be able to optimize the smart farming process.

Beyond this though, farmers will soon be able to use drones to seed and plant their fields. When these drones are combined with IoT software and autonomous operation, a fleet can completely replace the need for manual labor. Plus, with precise planting, the drones ensure that each crop is planted with ideal conditions. This can increase crop growth and provide a higher crop yield. This can be taken a step further, as drones will be used for crop spraying applications, offering farmers the ability to eliminate a labor-intensive task. How? Through the use of GPS, laser measurements, and ultrasonic positioning, enabling each drone to adapt their position, adjust for geography and topography, and take into account wind speed. If used correctly, drones can spray crops with greater accuracy and eliminate excess waste.

Finally, drones can be used for remote monitoring and field analysis. Rather than using a small team of workers to visually check on each field, a small fleet of drones can be used. This will eliminate the time needed to get sensitive data back about each field and eliminate extra labor on healthy plants that do not need tending.

3) Connected Farms Using IoT based Sensors

 

Despite the fact that IoT technology has been a bit of a catch-term used for the idea of having computers, machines, and devices connected to one another and able to communicate and exchange data, the term does apply here with smart farming. Smart farms will have IoT Sensors embedded throughout every single stage of the farming process and as a result, on every single piece of equipment used. These sensors will be able to take in data such as light levels, soil conditions, air quality, weather, & irrigation needs. This data can then be transported back to the farmer or directly integrated into the robots that autonomously respond and take care of the work needed. This can be anything from performing weeding maintenance, watering and pruning plants, harvesting crops, and collecting crop and animal data.

This can go a step further with drones, which will have a bird’s eye view of plant health, soil conditions, and weather. They can generate maps that will help guide the robots being used and help the farmers’ plan out what steps to take in the farming process. In this type of smart network, not only will there be higher crop production, but there will increase the quality of the food and how quickly it becomes available. The information that gets generated through the smart farming process will be the backbone of operations as it will allow farmers to see all aspects of their farm at a glance, including which fields need watering, what harvesters are doing and which animals and plants need attention.

Smart Farming is In Its Infancy But is Inevitable

As helpful smart farming will be to the agricultural sector, there are still a lot of hurdles that have to be overcome before it becomes a widespread IoT based farming solution. However, despite its infancy, precision farming is definitely inevitable as our advancement in technologies will make it possible, it’s just about raising the capital to fund the innovations needed to get the technology running in real-time rather than being just an idea on paper.

If you want to know more about IoT solutions for farming, get in touch with our IoT experts now.

Why Voice Bots Will be the Next Frontier in Automation

One of the biggest shifts in communication technology is underway, as the exponential growth, integration, and acceptance of artificial intelligence continue to dominate our digital landscape. One particular sector that is poised to make a tremendous impact within artificial intelligence’s realm is voice-based automation. The widespread use of voice-based assistants has caused companies to invest and adopt into the technology aggressively, as to meet the demand of increased consumer expectations for real-time connections to brands and companies. Due to this, we are looking at voice-controlled automation as the future for marketplaces, online transactions, and IoT products but first, let’s take a look at how we got here.

How Chatbot Automation Has Shifted Us Away From Customer Support Teams

When we take a look back at the past, customer service involved a complicated series of steps for the consumer.. If one wanted to get into contact with the company, they would have to find a number to call, navigate through a series of prompts, and then wait to be connected with a customer service representative. At this point in the process, they would need to reconfirm identifying information before receiving the support needed. This meant that customer service representatives faced repetitive, mundane, and low-level inquiries, over and over again on a daily basis, often causing the support to be delayed or causing frustration on the consumer’s end. In come chatbots, the better way to answer repetitive questions that pop up over and over again through live chat, e-mail, and phone calls. These chatbots are a cost-effective one-time investment, to providing on-the-go customer support that is efficient, responsive, and available twenty-four-seven.

Here is how they are shifting us away from full-fledged customer support teams.

• Chatbots can take over a wide range of customer touch points, from gathering relevant information such as name, e-mail, issue, feedback, and inquiries to choosing the correct support agent to forward the individual to.
• Chatbots can reduce the need for a customer support team to be around twenty-four-seven as they can be online for as long as possible, and manage multiple conversations simultaneously.
• Chatbots are cheaper to acquire and install them is incredibly easy. This trumps hiring a massive customer support team that requires training and on-going expenses.
• Chatbots streamline the passing of customer information, improving the customer experience that a consumer has with an actual agent.
• Chatbots have a quick response time, unlike live agents that you must wait in queue for.
• Chatbots can attend to more than one customer at a time, ensuring that everyone is dealt with.
• Chatbots do not need any type of human intervention, allowing it to consistently chat for hours without the need for a break.

All in all, chatbots cannot replace a human customer agent completely but they do save companies a lot of time, money, and energy when it comes to customer service teams. Now that we understand the advantages of chatbots, let’s take a look at how the advancement of machine learning and voice command is moving us towards voice-controlled bots and economic transactions.

What Is Voice-Controlled Transaction Automation and Why Is It Inevitable?

A voice-controlled transaction is simply, a transaction that you make using a voice command as the prompt into a voice-assistant. With voice-controlled smart hubs and digital assistants already being a popular option among consumers, it is only natural that the progression and use of voice-recognition technology for making payments online become the way of the future.

According to Business Insider Intelligence, voice payments on eCommerce platforms are common, with payments made to colleagues or friends (P2P) and bill payments made by voice the following suit. The growth that we are seeing in this area is happening due to two artificial intelligence sub-categories, natural language processing, and machine learning. Essentially, our computers are now better equipped to understand speech (through natural language software) and are now able to learn from contextual information and apply it to future conversations (machine learning), both of which create a more dynamic, scalable and, intuitive user experience. As such, we are seeing banks and mobile payment platforms implementing voice-controlled transactions across voice-assistant devices such as Google’s Home, Apple’s Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa.

As voice-controlled transactions become the way of the future, we are going to see more growth alongside voice authentication security systems, which are what will allow or deny a person access to online transactions. A voice authentication system uses a person’s voice biometrics or patterns to identify who is speaking (not what they are saying as that is speech recognition). This includes creating a digital numerical representation of an individual’s dialect, frequency, style, and pitch and matching it against already-recognized patterns. Any slight differences or distortions will deny or lock access to the online transaction.

How About Voice-Controlled Automation and IoT Products?

Speaking of Google Home, Apple’s Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa, as we grow more connected through systems like these and create more sophisticated voice-controlled assistants, we are opening up the possibility of having a limitless number of voice-controlled home devices. We’ve seen this on a small scale with audio enabled smart light bulbs, entertainment systems, and security systems like Nest, but not on a larger scale quite yet. Eventually, we will jump from using voice-controlled assistants to turn on or off our ovens, televisions, fridges, thermostats, and mirrors and instead just use our own voice.

Finally, as the world moves towards enabling and integrating more sophisticated voice bots and voice-controlled devices into our homes, payment systems, and businesses, we will see it become the natural way to interact with utility marketplaces like food delivery services and booking services. We will be able to use nothing but our voices to open up applications, sort through the menus, book what we need or order what we want, and of course pay for it, all in the manner of a few minutes, completely hands-free.

Although we may not know exactly where voice technology will take us, it is definitely inevitable that voice bots are the new frontier in automation. They will make it easier to complete mundane and repetitive tasks such as answering customer support questions, purchasing food, or booking a venue, while still enriching our lives by making the world more connected and easy to use. Beyond this, voice bots, voice search, and voice assistants bring a level of personalization that both the digital and physical world hasn’t seen yet.

Looking for Chatbot development services for your business? Let’s Talk.