Media Party New York @ Brown - 2026

BOTO is an AI-powered WhatsApp bot created by InfoAmazonia to help people find trusted, relevant, and easy-to-understand news about the Amazon on the platform they already use every day. Built with large language models, BOTO responds to a simple but urgent problem: in much of the Brazilian Amazon, WhatsApp is a primary digital channel, while access to reliable journalism remains uneven and fragmented.
The project uses AI to deliver geolocated news, explain complex issues in simple language, summarize stories, personalize updates based on user interests, and collect audience input for future coverage. But BOTO is not limited to InfoAmazonia’s own reporting. It is being designed to include stories from other outlets selected through InfoAmazonia’s editorial curation process, based on reliability and relevance. The goal is to create a trusted entry point where users can find credible news about the places and issues they care about, regardless of which outlet produced it. Rather than asking people to navigate brands, websites, or search results, BOTO brings together trustworthy journalism in one conversational space. The product is being developed through an audience-centered process that includes testing, focus groups, and continuous feedback from real users across Amazon states.
In this keynote, I’ll share the core question behind BOTO: how do you distribute trustworthy journalism in places where platform habits, connectivity constraints, and local information needs do not match the assumptions of mainstream digital news products? Then I’ll show how we are using AI inside WhatsApp not as a gimmick, but as a practical layer for discovery, distribution, and engagement in public-interest journalism. Finally, I’ll reflect on what we are learning about accessibility, editorial trust, audience behavior, and the role of messaging platforms in the post-search era of news.