Kata’s founding team. (L-R) Wahyu Wrehasnaya (CFO), Reynir Fauzan (CMO), Irzan Raditya (CEO), Ahmad Rizqi Meydiarso (CTO). Photo credit: Kata.ai.
Kata.ai, a Jakarta-based startup that develops Indonesian-language chatbots, has raised a US$3.5 million series A round led by the Taiwanese Trans-Pacific Technology Fund (TPTF).
In today’s release the firm says it’ll use the capital to launch in new markets, starting with Taiwan and other Southeast Asian countries. This makes Kata one of a few Indonesian startups to tackle international expansion early on. The startup in its current form is less than a year old, though its predecessor, a virtual assistant called Yesboss, started in 2015.
Investors in this round also included Korean-based Access Ventures, Indonesia-based Convergence Ventures, and MDI Ventures – the venture capital arm of Indonesian state-owned telco Telkom, as well as VPG Asia, Red Sails Investment, and angel investor Eddy Chan. TPTF principal Barry Lee has joined Kata’s board of directors.
Kata.ai uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to create digital personas that can engage in conversations, helping businesses to understand their customers better and automate the support process. As part of its international expansion, Kata will learn to handle more languages, including Mandarin Chinese.
One bot in the Indonesian market is Jemma, which Kata created in partnership with Unilever. Jemma, a female persona, befriends people through the messaging app Line and chats about things like fashion and relationships. She asks customers for data like their names and birthdays and in return sends out horoscopes and tips.
Another bot Kata created is called Veronika. Developed for Telkom’s mobile carrier subsidiary Telkomsel in partnership with global consulting firm Accenture, she helps users top up their prepaid phone credit, purchase data packages, or book appointments at the nearest Telkomsel service stores. Veronika launched a few days ago and is available through Line, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram.
WhatsApp will be a game changer
Chatbot technology is still in its infancy. An experiment by Microsoft in 2016 turned sour when chatbot Tay, which was designed to learn from the people it had conversations with, started picking up racial slurs.
There’s also criticism that texting with a bot is not a desirable user experience because it takes too long. Bots will be more useful once voice control for devices becomes mainstream, these critics say.
Kata co-founder and CEO Irzan Raditya has counter arguments. Voice control is still a few years away from taking root in Indonesia, he admits, because devices are pricey and local language recognition is not yet advanced enough. However, he tells Tech in Asia that Indonesians don’t seem to mind texting. “On average, 4.2 messaging apps are installed on any given smartphone in the archipelago, where 97 percent of people use messaging apps multiple times a day,” he says.
To avoid making the same mistake as Microsoft with Tay, the bots Kata designs are narrower in scope and converse along a variety of pre-determined topics. They nudge people towards taking certain actions, like completing a purchase or submitting information.
Despite current constraints, there’s little doubt chatbots will eventually reach a stage of maturity where they contribute to the efficiency of enterprises and make life easier for their users.
Kata is seeing signs of success. Its chatbot Jemma has befriended more than 1.4 million Line users, it says. One of the longest chat sessions lasted for two hours, while the average lasts around four minutes. Overall, since Kata launched eight months ago, the total number of people who have engaged with its chatbots has reached 6 million.
Some messaging apps already let developers build chatbots for their platforms – Line, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram are some of them. WhatsApp – currently the most popular app in 44 countries, including Indonesia – has yet to open itself up to this type of interaction. “This will be a game changer for bots,” Raditya says.
Kata currently builds custom bots for enterprise clients, but it’s soon launching a web-based software that lets developers use Kata’s tools to build their own bots. This service is currently being tested by some clients, including Accenture, which Kata also worked with on Veronika.
Other local startups experimenting with business models around chatbot technology are Bang Joni and Sale Stock. Bang Joni is a virtual concierge bot developed for Line. He helps customers purchase things like flight tickets online. Sale Stock is a fashion-focused ecommerce company that’s working on chatbot technology that lets users make purchases without leaving the messaging apps they already use daily.
This post With fresh funds, Indonesian chatbot platform starts international expansion appeared first on Tech in Asia.
from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/kata-series-a
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