Sanjib Chaudhary chanced upon StoryWeaver, a multilingual children's storytelling platform, while searching for books he could read to his 7-year-old daughter. Chaudhary's mother tongue is Kochila Tharu, a language with about 250,000 speakers in eastern Nepal. Languages with a relatively small number of speakers, like Kochila Tharu, do not have enough digitized material for linguistic communities to thrive--no Google Translate, no film or television subtitles, no online newspapers. In industry parlance, these languages are "underserved" and "underresourced." This is where StoryWeaver comes in.

Predictions for the potential of artificial intelligence wax poetic -- solutions from climate change to curing disease -- but the everyday applications make it seem far more mundane, like a glorified clock radio. Thankfully, the future may be closer than we think. And the miraculous feats are not happening in Silicon Valley X-Labs -- in a plot twist, nonprofits are leading the charge in creating human-centered applications of the hottest AI technologies. From the simplest automated communications to contextual learnings based on analysis of deep data, these technologies have the potential to rapidly scale and improve the lives of our most underserved communities. Take chatbots for example, a new spin on mobile messaging that has historically been human-powered.