The Kriti AI initiative
Foundation for your Next-Gen Chatbot
Introduction
The year 2016 was an important year in terms of the wider rollout of the Chatbots and the shaping up of a wider ecosystem. The domain, which was limited to a select few, was thrown wide open with multiple tech giants opening up their channels for chatbots. Here is a look at some of the channels now available to developers:
Messenger, Kik, Slack, Telegram, Skype, Viber, Line, iMessage, Amazon Echo, Discord
In addition, the complexities of NLP with machine learning, NLU services and related technologies are now been made accessible via various packaged SaaS solutions by leading tech players:
Microsoft: MS Cognitive Services Suite; IBM : Watson Services; Google: GNL, Api.ai; Facebook: wit.ai; Amazon: Alexa, Lex etc
Collectively, this has created an unprecedented opportunity for a wider range of stakeholders (e.g., developers, copywriters, agencies, businesses, brands).
The Beginning
After the Facebook announcement in F8 conference in April 2016, it was quite the buzz in tech circles. As an early adopter, I recommended the FB chatbot channel to a social networking startup focused on fashion, which had a niche community on its mobile apps.
After the go-ahead, the working prototype took 3 days to build. It was very simple. This fashion bot just leveraged the existing features and surfaced an entry edge to the app-based community from the messenger channel. Users could upload an image, which would get published to the app users and fashion experts and their opinions (e.g. likes, dislikes) are conveyed back to the user on the chatbot.
The experience was something unique, both in terms of development as well as for the first time users.
Start of a Teaching Initiative
After a decade-long experience in diverse enterprise products and various roles across the spectrum, I was contemplating becoming a teacher since quite some time. The chatbots seemed to be the right topic with which to get started. Here is the teaching course I published on Udemy and other places in August 2016.
The course saw massive interest from folks all around the world. Over 6,000 enrollments within five months from over 80 countries. More importantly, this provided me an exhaustive opportunity to see the obstacles being faced by new and seasoned developers, and provided insights into a solution for solving those.
In addition to the developers and enthusiasts enrolled in my training course, I started engaging with the wider community via online forums, message boards, FB groups and bloggers who were equally excited by the chatbots and their potential use-cases.
Moment of Truth
This journey provided valuable feedback and experiences from a broad cross-section of grassroots users (e.g., new developers, seasoned developers, product managers, startups, and of course, tech enthusiasts and early adopters).
After the initial euphoria of “Hello World” chatbots and 5–20 steps of conversational flow-based bot products, it becomes evidently clear that to create breakout products the current level of tech and existing tech tools are not enough.
The bot makers require tools which can help them make chatbot products which are 10x, or even 100x, more complex and exhaustive. Many development agencies who are quite established in traditional software products like mobile apps, web apps or desktop software are still searching for toolsets that can help them utilize their existing expertise and experience in building meaningful bot products.
Similarly, the individual bot developers and the chatbot startups are also noticing a similar, perhaps even wider sets of challenges.
Presenting the Kriti AI initiative
Sometime in December 2016, I started on the initiative to provide an industrial-grade instrumentation suite — toolsets to empower chatbot programmers, startups and agencies.
It has been an exciting journey, with lot of personal and financial investments to build the pillars of a mega-scale instrumentation suite.
In the coming days and weeks, Kriti AI would make available tools and technologies for you to build your NEXT-GEN chatbot product.
This is an introductory piece to provide context to the current target audience for Kriti AI, namely:
- Chatbot Developers
- Startups
- Agencies
Do follow this space as we move out of our stealth phase in this month of March, making available to you the tools to make your breakout chatbot products!
