This startup uses artificial intelligence to help you buy a phone

Buying a smartphone is not an easy task. It requires days, if not weeks, of meticulous research, going through numerous product reviews, user comments, and product comparisons and gaining insights from friends, family, and even acquaintances. You want to buy the perfect smartphone – the one that suits all your needs. This Hyderabad-based startup called Enixta Innovations wants to make this easier. Their product, Buysmaart helps users choose the perfect phone using artificial intelligence.

Buysmaart is a personalized product discovery platform. It uses artificial intelligence to provide a comprehensive overview of a product, thereby allowing users to make better buying decisions. “I always do a lot of research before buying any product, and very frequently end up being dissatisfied after purchase, despite all that research. I wanted a platform that provided a comprehensive overview of a product that included not just the specifications, but also user reviews and expert reviews. I knew that it was necessary to use artificial intelligence to help the layman make sense of the millions of user reviews available online,” Giri Devanathan, CEO and founder of Enixta Innovations, tells Tech in Asia.

“At the same time, I also realized that everybody has different needs from a product. Take a phone for example – one person may want a great camera and good battery life, another might want high performance for playing games, and so on. This instigated me to come up with the idea for Buysmaart,” he adds.

Artificial intelligence to mine data

Buysmaart allows users to personalize the search process, based on their individual requirements. A user can prioritize various features like battery, camera, display, and performance and Buysmaart comes up with choices that fit the criteria. A person seeking a great camera will see phones with that feature ranked higher in the search results, whereas a person who wants good battery will see phones with good batteries ranked higher. “Our phones are rated as per their specifications (specifications score) and as per their user reviews (sentiment score – derived using AI). We use these two scores to arrive at a total score for the phone. You can explore and discover products based on these scores,” Devanathan explains.

Where artificial intelligence comes in is mining data from user reviews. Buysmaart’s proprietary algorithms in the area of text analytics, sentiment analysis, and natural language processing help it derive meaning from a multitude of sources. The company’s AI engine sifts through over 50,000 phone specifications, 5,000 phone variants, and over one million user reviews. “We automatically classify reviews as positive/negative using our AI algorithms. We are also able to identify the subject matter of these reviews (classify them as camera reviews, battery reviews, display reviews, and so on). Moreover, we highlight the keywords that generate the negative/positive sentiment in the reviews,” Devanathan explains.

What’s next for Enixta

Enixta was founded by Devanathan in June 2014. He was formerly working for companies like PayPal, Nokia, Yahoo, and eBay. “We inaugurated our office in Gachibowli, Hyderabad, on August 6, 2014. Like a mother delivering a baby, by sheer coincidence, we launched Buysmaart on May 6, 2015, exactly nine months after the inauguration date. We have six employees working for us, assuming different roles,” says Devanathan.

The company has managed to raise US$1.5 million from family and friends, that should help sustain it for the next six months. Enixta is currently operating in the mobile phone space but is planning to expand its catalog to laptops, tablets, cameras, and cars.

The company’s revenue is generated through affiliate commissions. It has partnered with major ecommerce players such as Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal, and Naaptol. Whenever a user clicks on ‘buy’ on Buysmaart, he/she gets redirected to the retailer’s website. Every time the user buys a product there, Buysmaart gets a referral commission.

Fierce competition

The company faces some steep competition in the ecommerce affiliation space. Buyhatke is one such price comparison portal founded in July 2012 by Gaurav Dahake, Prashant Singh, Srikanth Sethumadhavan, and Rohit Shah. The portal compares prices of a specific product between different websites and helps consumers find out the one offering the lowest price. It has various subsidiaries such as Comparehatke and a portal specifically for mobiles called Comparemobiles.

91mobiles, the brainchild of Bharanidharan Viswanathan and Nitin Mathur, is another major player in the affiliate revenue space. It’s a Gurgaon-based gadget research portal that claims to attract 4.5 million users every month and over 20 million page views per month. Other players operating in this segment include MySmartPrice, Reviews42, and PriceRaja.