Canada’s tech community include a Montreal-based startup called Botler, which wants to make it easier to start the immigration process for Quebec.
While Amir Moravej and his team had planned to launch Botler, their AI-assisted immigration bot, in April 2017, the executive order has significantly sped things up.
Moravej had arrived in Canada in 2009, for a master’s degree in engineering at Concordia University. After graduating, he founded a messaging app, and tried to obtain permanent residence via the federal government’s much-touted Startup Visa program. But the scheme doesn’t cover Quebec, so Moravej applied under the provincial program for locally-educated students. By this point, his work permit was running down, so he returned to Tehran to await a decision on his application. Then came the forums, chat groups and the bot.
Botler, an immigration tool powered by artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, Moravej and his team launched an updated product, designed to help users through the process of putting together an immigration application. The first scheme Botler is being applied to: the Programme de l’expérience québécoise (PEQ), for foreign workers and students residing in Quebec. “Imagine you don’t have any information about the [program] but you want to apply,” instructs Moravej. “You can use this bot for the whole process, from the very beginning to the very end.”
Moravej and his team have been focusing on building Botler so that in some ways it can replicate the functions of a lawyer, helping immigrants through the process.
“Immigration is a three step process. The first step is understanding if you’re eligible to apply to a specific program or not. This is actually what we’re launching right now. The second step is, once you find you’re eligible, you need to figure out what type of documents you need to provide to the government, so that’s actually what we are building right now. Our bot can basically read documents and review the documents to make sure they look good: they have the right stamps, they have the right letterhead, etc.”
The third step is to fill out the application form, something that’s also very tricky. It’s difficult to find a lot of information about the forms and the forms are very complicated. So the bot will fill out the forms for candidates completely automatically.
“They don’t need to even see the forms, the bot will do it for them. The information that the bot will put on the forms is being populated from the documents and from the conversation the candidate has with the bot during the process. This is completely automated, we automate the full process.”
It will be able to assist those currently working or studying full-time in Quebec who wish to apply through the Quebec experience program (PEQ) is currently absolutely free through botler.ai.
