Flavour of the day or here to stay, businesses are jumping in head-first into conversational commerce.
WHETHER YOU’RE looking for a movie on Netflix, playing Pokemon Go, ordering flowers, checking in for a flight, or getting divorced in Europe — there’s a bot for that. There are even bots for Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton.
In Silicon Valley bots have become a favourite topic and all over the world, companies are jumping head-first on to the botwagon.
There’s enough head-spinning hype to make one down right skeptical. And it doesn’t help that not enough people have even experienced a bot yet.
While some snidely say business are getting their bots together just to be in the news and not be left behind, it’s obvious to many that conversational commerce, which once started out with real humans, will be the way forward as artificial intelligence and natural language processing advance and combine and come out of their research labs. What more endorsement does one need than from Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Satya Nadella who say bots are the next apps.
India is as much bot country as anywhere else. Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of Tata Sons Ltd. certainly believes in them. In May this year, he invested an undisclosed sum in Niki.ai, an artificial intelligence startup, set up by four IIT Kharagpur Alumni founders to ‘revolutionise conversational commerce’. Sachin Jaiswal, one of the founders, is quick to point out that Niki.ai was started in 2015, ahead of the bot craze. Niki.ai is an app that uses natural language processing and machine learning technologies in a platform that has a chat interface for connecting customers with businesses. “We thought that things like recharging a mobile phone, takes so many taps and clicks...” says Jaiswal. “With a bot all you need to do is just tell it what you want.” With Niki.ai, one can book a cab, order food, pay mobile bills, and even get your laundry picked up.
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