alabot: Enabling human interaction with applications

Now this is a startup which I think really makes life easier for users. Pune based startup alabot aims to bring the power of natural language processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to our regularly used applications like Instant Messengers and Mobile phones.

According to Gartner, there are 7 grand challenges facing the IT Industry for which we need solutions. One of them is Non Tactile, Natural Computing Interface. Here is what Gartner has to say:

Non Tactile, Natural Computing Interface: The idea of interacting with computers without any mechanical interface has long been a desirable goal in computing. Some of the many challenges that remain in this area include the ability to detect gestures, developing a gesture dictionary and the need for real-time processing. Another set of challenges relate to natural language processing, which include speech synthesis, speech recognition, natural language understanding, natural language generation, machine translation and translating one natural language into another.

This is exactly the pain point that alabot hopes to resolve. Alabot is building an interface which is intuitive and intelligent and requires no learning curve.

This is what Akshat Srivastava, CEO, has to tell:

The pain point I feel is how does one extend a website / applications usability across languages and demographics. India has 300 million mobile users -10% or 15% know English. The majority are currently removed from content discovery and search. We are trying to level that field by adding NLP chat with alabot in exactly the same way you would with a friend – it mimics human interaction. More importantly it guides the user through the whole process – leaving the user to concentrate on what he really wants from the ecosystem.

I am sure most of you are still wondering how the hell alabot is going to help you. Let me explain by giving couple of  examples:

If you are a gtalk user, just add alabot.travel@gmail.com as a friend and start firing questions to it.

Now here is the sample conversation (see image) I had with alabot travel.

I asked I wanted to travel from Pune to Chennai, it religiously gave answers to the questions I asked.

Another example would be:

“I need to find which coffee houses have wifi facility”. Just ask the way you ask your friend and alabot will throw up the answers.

alabot will also be extended by doing e-commerce transactions. Once a search is done like the one above, users will be able to make the payments online.

alabot currently plans to cover 2 major verticals  – travel and local search.

The main function of alabot is to decipher what the user is asking using natural language processing. The content that alabot throws up comes from various content partners like travel search aggregators (cleartrip, ixigo, yatra etc), content providers (wikipedia), e-commerce payment (mchek, paymate) etc.

I have really liked the concept and feel that if alabot is able to decipher user’s questions 85% – 90% accuracy, they will have mass appeal. I can say this is truly a next generation startup.

Give it a spin and let us know what you feel.

Note: alabot is not launched yet, it is still in alpha and currently being tested privately by few users. It may throw you some weird answers as of now.