Most people would agree that chat bots have got the potential to change how lot of travel businesses work. Brands have been aggressively pushing for apps until a while back and now we are expecting to see something similar with chat bots. For brands, adoption this new trend means they have additions channels to communicate with the customers which are also open without a customer having to download an additional app. Even if an AI powered chat bot is being integrated into a travel app, it will speed up the process and reduce resource requirement for the brand.

The team at Morph ai

Meet Abhishek, Vipul, Pratik and Niyati who form the team at Morph.ai. They were employed in Sprinklr which is a unicorn now and then worked with Supertext to build all the technology grounds up. While working in social space with Sprinklr, the team recognised the potential of conversational commerce and realised that it could be a great opportunity for wide variety of businesses. The team started developing the idea from scratch and in the meantime, chat platforms like Kik and Messenger introduced their bot stores, validating their idea and giving them more options to explore. This led to the birth of Morph.Ai in March 2016.

Morph.ai is a B2B platform that enables brands to build conversational services. This allows the brands to use the artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies of Morph to create chat bots and use them on chat interfaces like Facebook, SMS, chat on website and anywhere else where chat is a medium. Morph.ai can seamlessly connect the technical infrastructure a brand relies on and offer that using chat interface.

This gives young travel brands an easy way to adopt the technology and explore the possibilities with chat bots without having to invest time and money into building from scratch. Bigger brands which are not looking to make an immediate move in this space can test the waters by implementing Morph as a low cost solution.

Talking about the scope in travel, Pratik says, “Chatbots can work wonders for online travel brands. All the actions that a customer performs on the website – discover, compare & book – can be done by chatbots. Getting flight schedule reminders, hotel bookings, ticket cancellations, price comparisons, checklist before you pack and many other such actions can be managed by a chatbot and make customer experience richer. Brands can go an extra mile & cross-sell between various verticals like booking a cab for the customer from the airport to the pre-booked hotel.  Instead of being just an automated customer support, chatbots can become a more intrinsic and complete solution to the travel world.”

Even though this segment is fairly new, Morph.ai has some competition from converse.ai and motion.ai. But with a huge pool of target customers, not just in travel but in other industries as well, there is plenty of room for everyone to grow. At this point, Morph.AI is available on Facebook Messenger, SMS, Telegram and WeChat. Very soon they will be offering more options like website live chat, in-app chat, Twitter, Hike and will continue to keep adding more platforms that use chat as a medium.

If you are interested in building a chat bot for your brand, you can head to morph.ai or write them at hello@morph.ai.

Do you have a product as interesting as Morph.ai? Take up the challenge and register for Startup Knockdown+ now.

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The bots are invading the app space like an endemic. They are getting people to see the technological space as more interactive and quirky than the interface the apps use generally. All our reservations that app industry is booming is transitioning into a faded reality. As the apps blur into oblivion, the developers are more focused on bots which have come to the rescue (Thanks to some of the toolkits for amateurs now. They are easier to create!).

GIF Source: Giphy.com

We’re already familiar to the bots on Telegram and Slack platform. The bots on these platforms are free to use and easy to deal with as if they were real humans. Some developers say it’s easier for them to develop bots though it’s a little challenging to market them well.

Line messaging app today allowed AI-powered bots on their interfaces for businesses to interact with their fans and customers. Bots can respond to questions via company’s official Line account. Generic queries could be entertained in an interactive way such as asking for food eating joints around nearby places. The brand’s bot then fires back the suggestion, rating, and maps.

CEO of the Line Corp Takeshi Idezawa said in a statement last month that social media apps would be incorporated very soon and this would definitely mark the beginning of the new era. During his keynote at Line Conference Tokyo 2016, he revealed that Line would launch mobile internet service and a prepaid debit card that ties to Line Pay. These features are all connected to Line’s home market, Japan.

The Line opened this bot API trial program to 10,000 corporate users who can make use of their own AI-based systems inside the messaging app. They will allow bots to be used for customer interaction, Ok Google sorts of searches and suggestions, as well as to control smart home gadgets. It also announced that it has all the right to shut down its bot service any time it wants if something goes wrong. Earlier this month, Microsoft fiasco-ed when its Twitter-based AI Tay, designed to mimic a human teen, went hay-wire. This bot was then led by mischievous Twitterers.

To avoid that kind of disaster, Line is limiting the experimental bots to accounts that have no more than 50 followers.

Source: Techinasia

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There isn’t a single day when the tech community doesn’t talk about the upcoming wave of bots. Chat has emerged as a popular medium for brands to communicate with their customers which is clearly indicated by the investors’ interest in chat based concierge services. Now brands are exploring the possibility of speeding up the process by introducing bots and artificial intelligence in the mix. In India, Tripoto made the first move in this direction and introduced Tripoto.Ai. The product received positive feedback on Product Hunt as well.

Thousands of travellers share their travel experiences everyday on Tripoto allowing millions to easily plan their trips. They are aiming to use the diverse perspective of travellers in their community to make Tripoto.Ai the best and fastest learning AI system in travel.

(L to R) Tripoto Founders Anirudh Gupta and Michael Lyngdoh

We spoke with Michael Lyngdoh, Co-Founder of Tripoto to learn more about Tripoto.Ai and the future of chat bots in travel. Here is an excerpt from the conversation:

What was the idea behind Tripoto.Ai?

The intention was to serve a larger audience and also create hooks for users to engage more deeply with our application. While itineraries serve a large number of customers we noticed that a lot of our users wanted to get answers to specific questions that they had in mind. We have a large and ever-growing user generated content/data set available to us. We realised that a self-learning AI based engine that uses our UGC would be the best way to answer these questions. We wanted to keep it Ai based because it scales up easily, answers instantly and is available 24*7. An AI based system also utilizes our advantage of having a huge data source.

We have seen a shift towards chat as a medium for providing services? What do you think is the reason for this shift?

Chat based applications are widely used today for communication with WhatsApp and WeChat leading the way. Users are very comfortable using chat as a medium to interact and this behavioural shift is driving the use of chat as a medium for providing services.

Do you think AI can match the level of human service?

AI can match the level of a human but it will take time for the system to learn and a lot of data. Till then AI can answer basic to medium level difficulty questions reasonably well and respond to 80% queries. The remaining 20% can be fed by humans. This leads to ease of scaling, instant responses for most queries and 24*7 availability.

How do you plan to take it further? Once out of beta, do you see it attracting enough users to become the prime choice of your users for trip planning?

We are currently integrating the AI into every part of our application while continuously making it smarter. The Tripoto AI will become your online travel persona which knows you, travels with you, helps you record and share your memories and plans personalised holidays with you. The AI system will act as a gateway to lead the users to other parts of the Tripoto Application – Publishing, Search, Itineraries, Hotels etc.

It is rumoured that Facebook will open up the Messenger to third party developers soon. What opportunities do you see there?

I think it’s a great distribution opportunity for us. Microsoft has already opened up its platform. We look forward to distributing our service on all major chat applications as possible.

It will be interesting to see how other travel brands react to this development. With an increase in number of such services, it won’t be a surprise if a large number of apps start featuring chat as the prime consumer facing interface.

You can check out Tripoto.Ai here.

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Bots have the potential to bring the next big transition in mobile technology and might significantly affect the ecosystem of mobile apps. Mobile devices are getting flooded with apps and people are spending most of their time between only a handful of apps. Messengers and social networking apps take a larger fraction of that time and thanks to the recent developments, bots are being integrated into these communication channels. The progress in natural language processing has also helped significantly.

It is widely rumoured that at the upcoming F8, Facebook will open up its messenger app to third party developers and offer a bot store. However just a few days from the big announcement, Kik, a popular chat messenger, has introduced its own bot store. At this point, Slack seems to be the only major platform that features a wide array of bots and is a widely popular team chat tool. Kik on the other hand has younger users and according to the company, approximately 70 percent of its users sit between 13 and 24 years of age.

This isn’t the first time Kik is experimenting with bots and we have seen them offer bots to serve up content for brands in the past. Now they have launched a full-fledged bot store with 16 bots. At this point, we don’t see any travel or e-commerce brands on the list but it might change soon. Considering the fact that most of the users of Kik are young, travel brands like Airbnb that are popular among young travellers can make the most of the feature.

Along with the bot store, Kik is also offering tools to allow developers to easily develop their own app on https://dev.kik.com. The bots are pretty simple at this point but brands and developers might see potential in them and find a variety of uses. The direction of where this segment is headed isn’t very clear at this point and will take a while to take shape similar to what we saw with apps. One clear advantage bots have over apps is that they can keep sitting in the chat list of user and he or she won’t feel the need to remove an unused one like in the case of an app.

Whether or not this will help the instant messaging app gain traction with different users is yet to be seen. The competition will increase to a serious level if and when Facebook introduces its bot store and it is up to the developers on how they use different bots on different platforms.

Read the announcement on Kik blog here.

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