AI Chatbots – Dutch Uncles

Is Artificial Intelligence More Hype, Less Reality?

Vaishali Das — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 16:11:40 +0000

Uses of AI in Enterprise Tech

Usually, AI works with the data that has already been updated in the system. It analyses the data for correlations and patterns which are used for future predictions. Chatbots are used in a similar manner where they interact with people and provide automated assistance.

Using AI can be beneficial for businesses in a way that it provides enterprises with an insight of their operations. It makes sure that everything is well documented without any repetitions and merely makes the data analysing part quicker and smoother. But all this can fail if one doesn’t have the proper knowledge of its working and programs.

Is AI, much Hyped and Less of a Reality?

AI being everywhere in the news, it can be said that it is the need of the hour for company’s growth. Companies usually misunderstand the actual functioning of AI and generally don’t have a clear understanding of its programmes. Although it has a promising factor of easing up some of the hurdles of the company, organisations have to overcome the hurdle of implementing AI successfully in order to enjoy its benefits.

According to the recent survey conducted by KPMG, Artificial Intelligence as a technology is moving very fast. Even with ‘AI winter’, a term describing the downfall of AI in technology’s history, the market for enhancing tools and technology never stopped. In fact, people started taking interest in machine learning to ease up their production process. And with this AI made a comeback in the industry sector again.

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Using AI can be beneficial for businesses in a way that it provides enterprises with an insight of their operations.

In the enterprise’s technology, AI has created a buzz amongst the manual workers. With its machine learning algorithm, it is masking the human agency behind certain processes. This has created a much-hyped demand in the market for AI trained people. But because of the less knowledge and understanding of its functioning there has been a shift in the hiring processes as well.

Current Enterprise AI Trends to Keep an Eye Upon in 2021

Starting from investors inclining more towards AI based companies, enterprises are seeking best practices to update their existing data management and IT infrastructure. Organizations are looking at how AIOps and AI network assistants can provide aid to their IT teams focusing more on strategic problems and improve the experiences of their employees and customers.

Some of the AI trends to watch out in 2021:

Greater cloud and AI collaboration which will help in monitoring and in managing the stored data.
AIOps will help IT sectors with an end-to-end visibility needed to support its employees in this new normal COVID world.
In the coming years there will be more structured data that RPA or Chatbots can use to automate transactional activity in an organization.
Artificial Intelligence will become more explainable. Top companies will be investing more in the education of their IT leaders so that they can understand and implement these AI solutions across the network.

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How is Gupshup Uniquely Positioned to Win the Conversational Messaging Platform Market?

Aakash Sharma — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 07:35:03 +0000

Founded in 2004 by Baroda Sheth, Gupshup is a messaging services company based in India, with operations in the United States and the United Kingdom. Gupshup enables ease of doing conversation through conversational messaging technology. It has helped various businesses in different areas, from test marketing to sales and support companies in emerging markets.

The company’s professional-level platform offers a 30-channel messaging API that provides a rich interactive experience and tools for creating collaborations between messaging channels.

More than a Billion-Dollar Valuation

Following the recent $100 million fundraising from Tiger Global Management, Gupshup is the latest entrée to the unicorn club as its valuation increased tenfold to $1.4 billion. The company is now aiming to leverage this investment to accelerate the interaction between businesses and consumers through message and product exchange channels. This technology is already being integrated into the business plan globally.

Gupshup’s Pandemic Induced Growth – A Rare Feat

The pandemic is accelerating how companies can communicate digitally with their customers and create messaging and networking experiences. Besides, as consumer prices rise, bilateral conversations are becoming necessary to be pursued by businesses.

With its latest funding rounds, the company will invest in product innovation and in-house research and development. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, offline retail stores (including restaurants, grocery stores and hairdressers) are also in high demand of moving to digital platforms. The company is now committed to creating digitally connected experiences for consumers.

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Through Gupshup, companies have made communication an integral part of successful customer interactions. Like websites, chat experiences allow companies to improve communication and sales with their customers.

Gupshup’s Model and Services

Gupshup offers APIs for more than 30 communication channels, especially SMS, to attract users. This includes chatbots, launch tools, advanced inbox functions, brainstorming, and client management software. The Gupshup API enables 100,000+ developers and businesses to create communication and messaging experiences and deliver 6 billion messages per month across 30+ messaging channels.

Modernizing the Conversational Messaging Market – What Can Others Learn?

As conversational platforms use artificial intelligence technology that allows people to interact with computers in a way that mimics human conversation, the sector has a lot of growth potential. Company’s working in this sector of technology in India have a significant mobile economy as their market. It has vast potential in equally dynamic voids in emerging markets similar to India.

With a focus on automation, self-service, development centres, APIs and user-friendly solutions for partners, learning from the Gupshup model, new entrepreneurs can enable clients of all sizes to use IP messaging more easily and quickly and create interactive experiences for their customers.

Furthermore, the size of the global conversational AI market is projected to grow from $ 4.8 billion in 2020 to $ 13.9 billion in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.9% over the forecast period.

The future frenzy of customers through social media platforms and the increasing integration of advanced AI functions are the main factors that add value to the conversational message market. This is expected to provide growth opportunities for new entrepreneurs and companies operating in different market segments of the sector.

Conversations are increasingly becoming the front end of businesses’ new digital activities – almost all companies are dependent on it. Hence, new start-ups of this segment can have a unique place to enter the chat platform market.

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Uniphore’s Growth: Raised a total of $220.9M in Funding Over 7 Rounds

Anju Nambiar — Sat, 10 Apr 2021 12:35:04 +0000

Uniphore Software Systems is a start-up that provides cloud-based enterprise software (SaaS) backed by Conversational AI. Uniphore’s Indian founders Ravi Saraogi and Umesh Sachdev established the company presence both in Chennai, India as well as Palo Alto, California. They essentially brought about automation for video and voice-based customer service organisations.

In its latest Series D Funding, Uniphore managed to raise $140 M backed both by new and existing investors including Sorenson Capital Partners, Serena Capital, Sanabil Investment, Cisco Investments, March Capital Partners, National Grid Partners, Chiratae Ventures, Iron Pillar Fund, and Sistema Capital. This funding round has raised the total net worth of the firm to $210 M. Over the course of 4 years, Uniphore has undergone 7 funding rounds.

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A start-up, now a unicorn, Uniphore is seeing no end to its growth. The owners already have made grand plans about the course of its growth and progress in the coming future.

Growth of the company

A start-up, now a unicorn, Uniphore is seeing no end to its growth. The owners already have made grand plans about the course of its growth and progress in the coming future. Uniphore is all set to increase its focus on its video-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. The other focus will be to enhance its product portfolio in key areas like trust, security, and Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

Uniphore’s growth trajectory

Uniphore’s growth has been steadily occurring with one acquisition after the other. It recently acquired AI-backed technology analysis, and emotion recognition Spanish firm ‘Emotion Research Lab’. Also, a part of their acquisition is video AI and RPA technology. Within the span of a year, Uniphore not only signed contracts with bigwigs (Tech Mahindra, NTT Data, Sitel, Firstsource, and WNS Global Services) but also recruited over 100 employees across the world. The fiscal year ending March 2021 saw a tripling of sales.

The biggest growth spurt came for Uniphore during the global shift to remote work last year. With an unprecedented demand for Video and Voice calling apps, Uniphore used the opportunity to transform their product in a way that customer service organisations could improve their conversations by detecting user intent and emotion.

Uniphore’s ambitious agenda

Uniphore has expressed confidence that it will make $100 M in contracted Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in the fiscal year of 2022. That’s not all, they are also keen on taking the company public through a direct listing or a special purpose acquisition company, soon.

Uniphore’s ambitious hiring plans

Uniphore is looking to go on a recruitment spree and has already affirmed that it is moving forward with plans to onboard 300 more people by 2022. The company wants to expand its market leadership and has already listed a number of job openings. The current open positions listed include requirement for a ‘Revenue Intelligence Analyst’, ‘Principal Talent Advisor’, ‘Implementation Partner Alliances’, ‘Senior Speech Scientist’, and Senior Executive for Internal Marketing Communications’.

What’s in it for me?

Start-ups can consider the Conversational AI Market as an ideal basecamp since this space is growing at an accelerated pace. The demand is not only high, but a number of Indian start-ups have successfully scaled up in this sector in a short span of time.

The Indian government was also on the lookout for Conversational AI providers and ‘Senseforth’, a Bengaluru-based start-up was recently chosen for a governmental Voice Assistant project.

What start-ups can learn from Uniphore’s growth is to swoop in on the right opportunity in Conversational AI. The right opportunity is here and now since remote conversations over voice and video calls are still going strong and have taken centre stage across all sectors. There is ample opportunity for receiving investments, and the huge market demand will only propel you forward.

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Tech Trends for Fashion Ecommerce to Rule in 2021

Shalmoli Sarkar — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 01:30:08 +0000

‘It is difficult to determine size while shopping clothes online.’

-The plight of an online shopper

An online shopper in India goes through ambiguity while selecting the right size of apparel. The fashion and apparel category though being one of the most revenue-generating category is recognized to have the highest return rate, with colour, size, and textile being the major reasons. Findings of a RedSeer report of 2019 say that about 20-30 percent of the products bought from fashion e-commerce stores are returned that accounts for about $6 billion of the total $32 billion gross merchandise value of online retail in India. Sometimes, when a customer returns a product, he has to incur the charges for reverse shipping. Reverse shipping becomes expensive for the company since the logistics firm has to go to that location to pick up that one parcel. Also, since the ordered apparel is worn and tried by multiple people, the same is repacked and sold to the next customer, by which the apparel neither gets washed nor ironed. To resolve this problem of high returns, the fashion e-commerce sector needs to implement technology solutions such as AR, VR and virtual assistants, etc. by which the customer can purchase the right apparel.

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About 20-30 percent of all fashion products bought online are returned that accounts for about $6 billion of the total $32 billion gross merchandise value of online retail in India.

- RedSeer Report, 2019

Phygital = Physical + Digital

The pandemic has restricted movement and people are comfortable buying online. With an increase in online shopping, its good times for offline stores. Shops that initially began as an offline store can transit into an online one offering a phygital experience. A phygital experience shopping experience is an amalgamation of technology such as Blockchain, virtual reality and augmented reality infused with the experience of physical shopping. Implementation of such technologies can be used for geo-targeting consumers and help fashion retail companies create specific offers and rewards. It will also aid the fashion e-commerce companies to gather insights on consumer shopping habits and patterns, footfall, efficiency, etc. It also helps to improve brand positioning, promotion, product, pricing and shopping experience.

New Tech trends that will enhance the fashion e-commerce shopping

The virtual shopping assistants

Consumer preferences and trends especially in the fashion industry are highly volatile, making it imperative for fashion e-commerce companies to go for a personalized shopping approach and customer-centric merchandising. Mimicking the sales assistants in a physical store, the fashion e-commerce companies can implement AI-based chatbots as the new virtual sales representatives. These AI chatbots or virtual representatives are computer programs that simulate a human conversation through chatting and messaging. When a customer arrives at the website, the AI chatbots engage with the site visitor in a conversation, first introducing themselves as a chatbot and shooting an array of questions that determines what the customer is searching for. After, knowing the preferences, the AI chatbots can directly take the customer to browse collections in the catalogue. The virtual assistants can provide suggestions of styling, selection of outfits, customer service, and product discovery. The conversational tone of finding products on the website makes the filter feature an obsolete one.

Virtual Trial Rooms

The fashion e-commerce industry is plagued by high returns that can be blamed on the inability to detect the right size of apparel bought. The long queue before trial room can be tackled by leveraging AR (augmented reality) technology that enables a virtual fitting room. In a virtual fitting room, the shoppers can click a picture of themselves and drag the chosen outfits that are AR filters, and create a unique style. Multiple collages of every outfit, style and fitting can be created for comparison and understand what works best.

An alternate virtual fitting room can also be created by including 3D models. Virtually a 3D model can be created by mimicking a shopper’s exact body measurements. Once the 3D model is made, it is a replica of the shopper itself, from where we can drag various outfits to the 3D model created.

A virtual fitting room allows shoppers to experiment with various looks and apparel combinations, which in offline trial room is limited to a few apparels.

Self-Checkout Kiosks

Online businesses are adopting omnichannel strategies to fully leverage the supply chain and better utilization of inventory. Unlike online shopping, billing of items in an offline store consumed a significant amount of time, leaving the shoppers annoyed. In times when customers are seeking instant gratification, the time taken for billing can be reduced by keeping self-checkout kiosks. Self-checkout kiosks enable quicker checkout by allowing the customer to complete billing in simpler steps and without any intervention of humans.

Blockchain Technology

Besides finance and digital currencies, blockchain technology is gaining ground in the fashion ecommerce industry as well. Customers often vent their resentment on social media of not receiving genuine products that eventually erodes the brand image. To counter fake products or products of substandard quality, blockchain technology in combination with physical RFID chips or QR codes, companies can track the multiple stages involved in sourcing the raw materials to distribution of finished products to the end consumer. It ensures that the entire process right from manufacturing to a finished product is performed in an ethical and secured manner by monitoring in between processes. It induces transparency since blockchain’s characteristic of distributed ledger can be accessed by manufacturers, suppliers, and vendors. The ledger contains a detailed history of the product’s origin to where it is presently.

How Shopify Helps Fashion E-commerce

Shopify AR

Fashion online stores website is the showroom, and the better the display of vibrant colours and detailing of a fabric or apparel, the more it entices the customer. Shopify AR is a web-powered augmented reality service that gives an immersive shopping experience to the customers driving more sales. It brings the product alive and allows shoppers to have a realistic idea of the size, scale, and detail of the products. Just like images, we can add 3D models to product pages. As per Shopify’s study, the conversion rate of products increases by 94 percent if it has AR content. It has an accessible toolkit to create a 3D model of the product that can be stored in the 3D Warehouse App that is integrated with Shopify AR, making it easy to add any models to the product pages. Shopify has an AR-powered-product customizer that can determine how potential buyers, window, shoppers, and loyal customers and explore products online. Its ‘size-up feature’ and 360-degree viewer allows customer to get an enlarged view of the product. The file size of the 3D-model should be of a minimum of 6MB and a maximum of 15 MB and file type to be in GLB. GLB is the binary version of the gITF (Graphics Language Transmission Format) 3D file format.

AI Chatbots

Artificial intelligence is shaping the online customer experiences by addressing their queries, grievances, providing suggestions, thus reducing the barrier of interaction between a brand and customer, personalizes the experience. The Shopify app store has a plethora of AI Chatbots apps to install for your fashion e-commerce site. The AI chatbots also connect with social media platforms. In case we want an in-built chatbot for the store, we can have some customized chatbot designs for an A/B test. The top five AI chatbots for Shopify are Tidio, Gobot, Tobi, Kit, and Intelliticks.

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As per Shopify's study, the conversion rate of products increases by 94 percent if it has AR content.

A blockchain plugin

The counterfeit products put business owners’ years of hard work in vain. The influx of counterfeit products in fashion e-commerce can be blamed on the lack of monitoring and control on the journey of raw materials to a finished product. However, Shopify is tackling this menace by blockchain integrated plugins, to ensure that the items sold on the site are authentic. The plugin is a combination of blockchain technology and a cloud-based application ‘TAM’ that allows companies to create non-fungible tokens (NFT) with which the physical assets can be secured. NFTs are cryptographic tokens that are unique and cannot be mutually interchanged. Products consisting of an NFT can be scanned by the customer to check if it is genuine.

The minimum contact to pay

To revolutionize the in-store retail experience for brands with an omnichannel presence, Shopify has launched a point-of-sale (POS) hardware Shopify Tap & Chip Reader. Shopify’s Tap and Chip reader allows customers to complete transactions by scanning the contactless mobile payment apps or by inserting credit/debit cards. The reader also connects with Shopify POS that provides a host of facilities like inventory management, secured payments, and a consolidated backend that links directly to the merchant’s online store.

With the above-mentioned technology advantages that Shopify offers, it is time for the fashion business owners to kickstart their own private fashion label.

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