Building a validation API for WhatsApp free-text responses — is this a pain you've hit?

[horatiu6]

WhatsApp bot devs — quick question 👋

When a user types "around 15K naira" into your data collection flow, what do you do?

A) Write custom parsing logic (again)
B) Send it to GPT with a prompt (expensive at scale)
C) Use structured message types to avoid free text entirely
D) Cry

We've processed thousands of real WhatsApp responses across Nigeria, Philippines and Bangladesh — over 70% of free-text fields came back ambiguous or malformed. Every project, same problem, different regex.

Building a locale-aware validation API for this: POST raw WhatsApp response + field type + locale → returns structured value + clarification prompt to send back if ambiguous.

Would you use something like this? Genuinely trying to figure out if this is just our pain or a universal one before I build it properly.