Robot guide: Halifax start-up aims to make visa process easier for international students

Madiwale, the team’s technology evangelist, said their target customer is universities’ international student support departments, whose advisors spend much of their time answering the same few questions.

“These questions are very redundant,” Madiwale said.

“RovBOT would take care of these basic questions and help the student advisor to be more efficient in their work, and be more productive.”

RovBOT will only speak English for now, and will focus on student visas, but the team said it will eventually speak other languages, and could expand to other immigration applications.

The team is still dialling in RovBOT’s algorithms, and in the meantime, they’re learning the business side of things during the province’s Sandboxes Project Incubation Bootcamp.

“We are strong enough with the technical background, but we don’t have similar expertise in business,” Madiwale said. “We get a lot of input through the boot camp which will help us strengthen our knowledge about the business part of what we’re doing.”

The bootcamp is taking place at universities across the province this summer, and at Dalhousie, it’s hosted by ShiftKey Labs at the computer science building.

ShiftKey manager Grant Wells said the bootcamp is funded by the Nova Scotia Department of Labour and Advanced Education. He said there are 23 teams of up to three people taking part. At the end of August, that number will be narrowed down to 10, and those teams will make pitches to a panel of judges who will award $50,000 in funding to up to five teams.

Samuthiravelu said if the RovBOT team wins, they’ll use the money to “boot-strap” their start-up, or fund it themselves, as they continue to work on their algorithm.