Your phone rings. It’s your boss – he needs you to be in Delhi first thing tomorrow morning. After the call, you shout out “Book a flight to Delhi tonight.” Pat comes the reply “Done. Should I book a hotel as well?”
“Yes. And make a reservation at the restaurant for 10 am tomorrow. Send an invitation to the boss.”
That’s not a secretary that you’re talking to, It’s your phone.
Welcome to the world of chat bots. The scene above is not science fiction. The technology is already here and is shaping up to be a hot battleground for tech giants and promising start-ups alike.
Already, companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft have personal assistant technology packaged with their devices through Siri, Google Assistant and Cortana, respectively. These assistants track your location, emails and other data so that they can autonomously provide you with personalised help, such as tracking your upcoming flight. Over time, they learn your behaviour, such as where you work, what route you take, and when you usually arrive, and use these to provide information, such as the traffic on your regular route to work and reminders when you should leave home – all without you having to tell it anything.
It’s not just device manufacturers. Instant messaging giants like Facebook, Telegram and Slack are enabling bots on their platforms and opening them up to developers. This allows any developer to write a bot and make it available to all the users on that platform. Users simply add the bot to their contact list like any other friend and chat with it to get things done. All this has attracted a slew of start-ups keen to take advantage of this new way of interacting with customers.
Bangalore-based start-up Payjo launched Recharge Bot (https://payjo.in) on the Facebook Messenger platform in April this year. The bot allows a user to recharge their phone by chatting with it. Srinivas Njay, co-founder of Payjo, says, “Topping up a prepaid phone account is a very common task, so we built a bot that can do it for you. Once you have topped your account, the bot learns your preferred plan, so it becomes very quick to do it again. The key is the artificial intelligence platform that enables the bot to be smart. We are using this platform to build more bots in the personal finance space.”
While the Recharge Bot focuses on a specific task, other bots perform a multitude of tasks. Personal assistant bot Niki.ai (niki.ai) can be used to order food, book taxis, reserve hotel rooms and more. Nitin Babel, co-founder of Niki.ai, says, “We want to be on the top of mind recall of our consumers when it comes to any kind of e-commerce transaction for any product or service payment. Niki will soon be able to book flight tickets for her users. Niki has close to one lakh users and can be used on-the-go for most services needed when one is on a holiday.”
What can a bot do that can’t be done using a traditional mobile app? The biggest benefit of a bot is that you can chat with it like a human being. This makes it simpler to use than learning the UI in a mobile app. Recent advances in processing of human languages have allowed bots to understand the different ways that a user may ask for the same task, and respond intelligently.
Aarti Gill, founder of Mumbai-based FitCircle (www.fitcircle.in), a bot that gives fitness and workout advice, points out, “About 60 per cent of common queries can be understood and answered directly by the bot. We have a pool of experts who fill in the remainder of the queries, and then train the bot on the new queries so that it can answer them next time. We are developing more bots that can be leveraged by customers who buy our nutrition supplements to track their intake, measure their goal and plan their purchase better.”
Recharge is one bot that can cater to a multilingual audience across India. “We wanted to reach maximum consumers in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Our bot can chat in various regional languages apart from English,” adds Srinivas.
Not all bots run on public messaging platforms. Popular test prep site pagalguy.com has developed bots that run within the mobile Prepathon app (www.prepathon.com), an app that helps users prep for examinations. Allwin Agnel, founder of Prepathon, says, “We have 5 bots that each help the student study more and learn more about their strengths and weaknesses, which help reduce 80-90 per cent of the repetitive jobs that a teacher does. This allows the teacher to focus more on how to deliver better learning instead of the boring job of assessing, motivating and going through each individual student’s performances.” Bots have also been a popular topic in Chennai’s tech community, with many meet-ups over the last few months to share knowledge on developing bots.
Spearheaded by tech evangelist Dorai Thodla, these meet-ups have taken place through the monthly meet-ups of the Chennai Emerging Technology (goo.gl/rF3lcy) group and Chennai Geeks forum (goo.gl/zzqXVH) and have seen large attendance from enthusiastic developers in the city.
Law professional Manasvini Krishna taught herself coding to develop Lawbot (www.lawbot.co), a bot that can analyse a legal contract and identify common errors and loopholes.
Manasvini realised the need for this technology when she was working in a law firm and had to spend a lot of time reviewing legal contracts. She says, “Scanning a contract for common errors is a routine job that does not require intelligent skills. Instead of a lawyer working at it, a bot can do it, and as a result, the lawyer’s time will be saved.”
And you don’t even need to know how to code to build a bot. Bot-building platform Gupshup (www.gupshup.io), has released tools to build chat bots using flowcharts and templates and publish the resultant bot on a variety of messaging platforms.
Apart from start-ups, are there any other uses for bots?
Says Dorai, “There is huge potential for government agencies to provide bots for their services, as they can be easily used on mobile phones and provide a convenient interface to get answers to queries compared to websites.”
Just as the mobile wave overtook web applications, with hundreds of developers reaching new consumers through mobile apps, the hype is now on artificial intelligence-powered chat bots taking over common tasks from mobile apps. It is still early days and time will tell if bots are a passing fad or the next revolution. This much is certain – tech giants are betting on bots, and Indian start-ups are eager to take advantage of the opportunities in the space.
