[Exclusive Interview] This Women-Only Social Media Platform Has 350,000+ Users, 1 Million+ Active Conversations!

Recently, we interacted with Mr. Rajneel Kumar, Co-founder, coto – a Web3 social community app by women, for women. A safe, supportive space to connect, share ideas & build friendships.

Here are the interview highlights:

1. How did you plan to associate with coto, given that it is a social media platform exclusively for women?

This women-only website was launched as a result of a personal incident involving the wife of my colleague, Tarun Katial. A while back, his wife received unpleasant messages on WhatsApp from an unknown person who was stalking her. Fascinatingly, she decided not to report the event because she believed it would be pointless as trolling like this happens frequently every day. Soon after, Tarun approached me and another one of our colleagues, Aparna Acharekar, to help build a safe space for women, which is when coto came into being. We wanted to create a safe space where women can connect with a group of like-minded women, express their passion and opinions freely and safely, discover new interests, network, and seek new opportunities, all without the fear of being trolled or judged.

As the Co-Founder and the head of the product & engineering team at coto, I am responsible for shaping the vision and strategy of product creation and marketing built on the back of state-of-the-art technology. Today, coto boasts a strong user base of 350,000 with 1 million+ active conversations taking place on the platform and 7,000+ thriving women-led communities across genres.

2. What is the role of AI in women safety? How is coto using AI and blockchain features to create a secure platform for women?

Leveraging artificial intelligence for women’s safety can be extremely successful. AI enables women to navigate their surroundings with increased security through real-time data analysis and predictive algorithms, creating a more inclusive and safer atmosphere.

Similarly, to give women a safe and fulfilling environment on coto, we are incorporating AI into every aspect of our platform, from gender verification through facial recognition to content filtering and classification using AI engines. AI is also being used for text-to-image and video generation, user identification, and local-global content distinction. To improve productivity, efficiency, and inclusivity, we are also encouraging our teams in the community, content, marketing, and development to make use of these AI tools.

Furthermore, when it comes to blockchain, coto users can participate in a token economy as well. By deploying blockchain technology and the token economy’s circularity, participants receive rewards for doing a variety of tasks. Creating value for the end user is the fundamental objective of these tasks. After completing the activities, the participants receive token currency, or coto Gains, which can be used to make purchases on the platform or trade it for cash or other cryptocurrencies.

3. Tell us more about the newly launched Q&A powered AI feature and what has been the response like so far?

As a significant leap forward in creating a safe space for women, we have launched our ground-breaking AI-powered Q&A feature on coto app. Through this Q&A feature, a new subset of tools and features such as unique text edit mode, anonymous posting, and tagging experts are introduced into the app. The latest upgrade incorporates OpenAI’s intelligent technology to encourage curiosity not only in the form of image or video but also questions and empowers women to learn and grow. Be it discussing taboo topics such as sex, marital rape, menstruation or embracing their imperfections, this unique feature underpins women’s right to ask and speak their minds louder on a digital platform like never before.

With this feature, coto has become the first women-only social community app to introduce the Q&A feature.

We have seen the engagement on the platform go up significantly because of the ease of asking questions. The number of questions asked in every community has multiplied exponentially.

4. What makes coto different from other social media platforms?

coto as a platform stands apart due to a number of factors. Some of them are:

• AI-Driven Gender Verification: We employ cutting-edge artificial intelligence algorithms to ensure that users are verified with utmost accuracy, creating a space that is exclusive to women. By leveraging AI for gender verification, we prioritise the safety and authenticity of our user base.
• Decentralized Community Creation: coto encourages women to create their own groups within the platform. This feature promotes inclusivity by enabling users to build close-knit networks based on common interests, experiences, and aspirations.
• Confidentiality and Privacy: coto places paramount importance on safeguarding user privacy. Our blockchain-based infrastructure ensures that personal information remains secure and anonymous. We eliminate the risk of data breaches or unauthorized access by leveraging decentralized technology, providing women with peace of mind as they engage in open discussions.
• Transparency and Trust: We believe that trust is the foundation of any thriving online community. coto by embracing transparency, provides users with clear guidelines and policies to maintain a respectful environment. By promoting transparency, we encourage responsible behavior and cultivate a culture of trust among our diverse user base.

5. What are the technical aspects behind coto’s AI integration?

coto’s AI integration encompasses various technical aspects. On coto platform, assistive content creation is tailored to user preferences. Entity extraction is done from multimodal content, text, image, and video, in order to navigate and relate better content recommendations. In terms of content consumption and delivery to the users, we use AI to achieve a semantic relationship between content and our users. We are building a synergised content graph with LLMs (Large Language Models) which play the role of complementary tools to achieve multidimensional relationships between both user-to-user and user-to-content directions. We use transformer APIs along with Vector database technologies in order to achieve the same. Additionally, AI/LLM are also playing an increasing part in our product development process. LLMs co-pilot our technical refinement process and bring higher fidelity views into implementation strategies so that we can deliver technical prototypes quickly and collaborate on those before getting to production. We also use tools such as GitHub Copilot as well as Tabnine to streamline coding and get developers to deliver more automated tests. This helps us yield better software, faster.

6. What according to you is the future of generative AI?

Generative AI has enormous potential and promise in the coming future. It was previously believed that only humans could create new things, such as technical codes, reports, and business studies. However, as generative AI systems started to gain traction in late 2022, they have become perfectly capable of producing detailed content in just a matter of time with few quick prompts.

While some might see it as a threat initially, with time, the potential of generative AI will become more and more apparent. With continued advancements, generative AI has the potential to revolutionise the way we create, communicate, and use technology by emerging as an essential tool in a variety of sectors.

7. What is coto’s future roadmap for the continued development of its AI integration?

coto is looking forward to bringing generative AI for both text and visuals closer to its users. The app will provide a tailored generative experience based on users’ preferences and profiles. We are also looking to expand on the content graph and LLM strategy by adding more touchpoints, dimensions of relationships, better content, and faster recommendations. Additionally, we will enhance our multimodal content entity extraction.

8. What are your thoughts on the potential future of women in the context of web3?

Women have a unique opportunity to engage in an inclusive and equitable environment in the world of web3. In contrast to many professions where gender discrimination still exists, in the metaverse individuals are free to express themselves and engage with others. Women are positioned to be key players in creating decentralised ecosystems, fostering innovation, and spearheading revolutionary projects as blockchain technology develops.

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