Rai: RAKBANK's AI assistant

Rai sits in the bottom navigation on the home screen, so it stays one tap away from anywhere in the app. It also surfaces as a contextual banner, offering to block a card or check a balance on the screens where that offer is actually useful, rather than waiting to be looked for.

It never replaces the phone numbers. Someone whose card is being used right now wants a person, not an assistant, so on the Support screen the numbers stay exactly where they were and Rai's card sits above them as the lighter option: try me first for a quick answer, call if you would rather talk to someone.

Two constraints carry the interface. A named greeting turns a blank composer into one obvious question, and a 200 character cap with a live counter keeps each message to a single intent instead of a full complaint.

Every reply ends in one action, not an explanation. Ask to send money abroad and Rai answers with one sentence and a button into the transfer flow, no copy about how international transfers work, because nobody asked for that.

Some requests are not Rai's to solve. A disputed transaction, a card being used right now, these need a person with the authority to act, not an assistant, so a live agent is never more than one request away. Rai gets a single attempt to help, and the moment the ask turns serious it stops trying and starts connecting instead.

The wait is the real design problem. Status pins to the top of the screen, queue position updates in place, and the thread stays where it is, so the agent picks up everything already said instead of the customer explaining a stolen card twice.

Arabic was never a translation pass. An Arabic conversation designer worked the intents alongside the English ones, so the assistant reads as though it was written in Arabic rather than converted into it. Register, phrasing, and how a bank is expected to address someone all shift, and none of that survives a word for word swap.

Every chat component follows RTL conventions. Navigation flips, the customer's messages move to the left and Rai's to the right, and the composer, counter, and send button reverse with them. The fiddly part is mixed text: a Latin name or an amount inside an Arabic sentence still runs left to right, so a line like the greeting has to hold both directions at once without its punctuation drifting to the wrong end.

Every reply carries a thumbs up and down, and that single tap does two jobs: it is the raw signal behind the satisfaction rate in the outcomes below, and the training data that makes each relaunch better than the last. The thumbs alone say what landed but never why, so the detail sits one step deeper, capped at 200 characters like the composer.

The confirmation says where the feedback goes rather than leaving it to vanish. People stop bothering the moment an input feels like it leads nowhere.