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Business News/ Industry / Infotech/  The rise of chat-based virtual private assistants
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The rise of chat-based virtual private assistants

That India has been slow to catch up with the rest of the world in using AI services has paved the way for chat-based services. Mint takes a look at three of them

Poor connectivity and the Indian accent remain key challenges in using a virtual assistant. Premium
Poor connectivity and the Indian accent remain key challenges in using a virtual assistant.

While the world is getting used to Apple Inc’s Siri and Google Now which use natural language processing—a way to talk to machines using human languages—and artificial intelligence (AI) to assist users search information, monitor and organise personal schedules and do various tasks on smartphones, India has been slow to catch up. Though much work is being done on creating algorithms running behind these AI services so that they can learn and adapt to users’ way of speaking and thinking, poor connectivity and the Indian accent remain key challenges in using a virtual assistant. Enter chat-based virtual private assistants. Mint looks at three of them:

1. Goodservice: A year old start-up founded by Vipul Aggarwal and Ruchir Jain, Stanford and IIM-A graduates respectively, Goodservice calls itself a concierge app. Type out your requirement—booking movie tickets, making appointments, getting service providers such as a plumber or an electrician, finding products and accessories from local stores and getting food delivered from restaurants—and human assistants from Goodservice will get it done for you. On Tuesday, Goodservice raised $1.6 million seed funding from Sequoia Capital, which it plans to invest in technology and expand its scale of operations. Goodservice says it already caters to requests worth more than 30 lakh a day, and is aiming to expand operations to 1 crore.

2. Insta Services: Mumbai-based start-up Instagetit.in launched a virtual personal assistant service for Mumbai and surrounding areas last month. The service uses text messages to communicate with the users and get things done as per request. The service charges a normal tip along with the original price for goods and services from online and local stores. It can take care of restaurant reservations, food orders, gadget purchases as well as delivery of purchased goods using local delivery services, among other things. Users can also text or WhatsApp the assistant to plan a trip, make appointment with doctor or send flowers. The company, Insta Services Pvt. Ltd, which was founded in December, ran an alpha testing for 10 days with 225 users last month when it launched its website www.instagetit.in. Registered users have reached 3,000 now. It completed 2,500 orders earlier this week, according to founders Kiran Sabne and Austin Gangar. It has a 13-member team, which works on completing requests received.

3. Natasha - Personal Assistant Bot by Hike Messenger: Two-and-half-year-old messaging company Hike Ltd launched a personal assistant feature for Hike chat app in February. It is based on a responsive bot—a program that uses Artificial Intelligence Markup Language, an Extensible Markup Language (XML) dialect for creating natural language software programs. XML is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format which is both human-readable and machine-readable. Natasha searches the Internet to match certain string patterns and produces responsive replies in the form of the hard-coded template. Apart from chatting with users as a person who has her own likes, Natasha can help users keep updated with daily stuff. It can check for information, weather, movie ratings, details and quotes among other things.

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Published: 24 Jun 2015, 02:21 AM IST
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