America’s sex education system is broken. This chatbot wants to be the solution – By Delia Paunescu (VOX) / Nov 17 2019
Can a chatbot teach teens about sex? This episode of the Reset podcast uncovers alternatives to traditional sex ed.
Planned Parenthood created Roo, a sex ed chatbot that answers teens’ questions while maintaining their anonymity. Planned Parenthood
US sex education is decades behind other countries. Right now, it isn’t even mandatory in every state. Add to that the awkwardness people feel about sex and bodies in general, top it with the idea of having to have these discussions in public, and what you get is a system that’s devolved into a total mess.
It’s no wonder 84 percent of teens look for sexual health information online. The problem there is that a lot of the answers they come across — about everything from STIs to puberty to pregnancy to sexual orientation — are often just plain wrong.
Naturally, tech wants to find a solution.
That’s how Planned Parenthood created Roo, a sex ed chatbot that encourages teenagers to ask all of their potentially uncomfortable sex-related without ever revealing their identity.
To build Roo, Ambreen Molitor, senior director of the Digital Product Lab at Planned Parenthood, first interviewed Brooklyn high school students about their online habits and what they would want out of a bot that talked to them about everything from safe sex to coming out. Her team discovered that above all, “teens really wanted to be anonymous.”
“Sometimes they didn’t feel comfortable talking to the community around them or in the sex ed classrooms. But also online, because more often than not, Gen Z’s teens in general are very aware that when you’re searching on Google, you’re being cookie’d. They’re very cognizant of what they type into the browser or the search query — which is really unique.”
In this episode, Molitor tells host Arielle Duhaime-Ross that Roo is seeing great success so far. Parents have even reached out on LinkedIn to praise her bot.
Of course, the complexities of human sexuality, specifically as they need to be explained to a developing and curious teenage population, can never be fully resolved through an anonymous computer that’s been preprogrammed with answers.
Continue to article: https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/11/17/20965326/sex-education-planned-parenthood-chatbot-roo-reset-podcast
