Meet Ask Empress: The world's first Ai assisted Chatbot for Peri+Menopause
Empress Naturals is leading beauty and wellness innovation with their launch of the first ever Ai assisted chatbot for women in perimenopause and menopause. After many months of development, it appropriately launched at WisePause on April 12, 2025. We were fortunate to catch up with founder, Elizabeth Koshy, about this ambitious project.
What Inspired You to Create Ask Empress?
We realized that there is a huge void of knowledge about the basics of menopause. We saw the need to create awareness and educate people. Women 35+ are an underserved community when it comes to finding out information about menopause. Even if you go to the doctor, they are not trained to educate their patients about menopause and perimenopause. You suffer in silence. Women are told not to talk about it. Most doctors only get 1-2 hours of training on menopause in medical school. I've heard countless stories of women struggling to find solutions for their symptoms -- being told they have autoimmune disorders, thyroid issues or other medical conditions. And sometimes they are prescribed drugs they really don't need when in fact, they are dealing with menopause issues. Because our estrogen levels drop during menopause, we are susceptible to diseases and autoimmune issues including cancer. Everyone reacts in different ways.
Why an AI Chatbot?
ChatGPT or Google will give you a answer but it may not be the right answer. We trained our chatbot, "Ask Empress" to give not hallucinogenic answers, but to give focused answers. The human touch was essential in training the chatbot. Three or four of our team members (including me as CEO) worked on it for about 6 months. We fed in over 1000 questions to train the chatbot so it would provide more authentic information. We also provided doctor's answers and relevant research we could find. We scraped the data from an e-book we had done in 2024. And of course, we tested it on everyone we could find so that it had a diverse set of responses to just about any questions.
Speaking of Questions, What Was the Strangest Question Ask Empress was Asked?
Well, one person asked "how do I make love during menopause"? The beauty of the chatbot is that it's anonymous so you can ask anything! You can also see what the real questions are -- not just what you assume people are asking.
And it's Free?
Even though we're a small brand and this was not a small undertaking, we've found that often, it's the small brands doing the heavy lifting on educating consumers. We wanted the chatbot to be accessible -- so it is free and you can ask any questions about perimenopause or menopause. We wanted to offer it as a resource to give to the community to educate and empower them. We wanted the community to be able to get credible answers quickly, easily and discreetly. Then we can connect them with experts and resources to help their Peri+menopause journey. Anyone can use it, just Log into www.empressnaturals.co and click the chatbot "Ask Empress" to access the chatbot.
How Many People Have Used It?
We've had about 300 people use it to date. It's a new tool and we are committed to growing our knowledge base to help make it the world's leading chatbot resource. We are continuing to update the chatbot every single day.
How Are You Promoting It?
We don't have funding, but we started a Facebook community to share our learning and insights. Once or twice a month we will have sessions with experts and they can ask their questions. We also partner with WisePause (a menopause conference) and gave out postcards with the QR code to access the resource. And of course, we are promoting it on social media
What's Next for Your Chatbot?
When we gather enough data, we would like to provide matchmaking resources for people in their geography. Right now we are focused on adding knowledge and value to women.