HaloDiana, can you get my dry cleaning please?

Diana, can you fetch my dry cleaning, please? Diana, can you sort out the catering for my cousin’s wedding? Diana, can you get me takeout from that greasy-but-good pizza place in South Jakarta? These are all examples of inquiries Ryan Gondokusumo and his team have been getting since they launched the SMS-based personal assistant service HaloDiana just one month ago.

HaloDiana is born out of Ryan’s other venture, SribuLancer, and is arguably the most viable competitor to take on YesBoss, the concierge service that snatched up seed funding from 500 Startups and other investors earlier this week.

So, what’s with the name?

“I just feel like there is an emotional aspect involved with handling all these inquiries from people,” Ryan tells Tech in Asia. “That’s why I gave her a person’s name, Diana. We want people to feel like Diana saves the day. We want to be able to deliver on even the most difficult inquiries.” Diana is also an acronym for Digital Assistant and Anonymous, Ryan claims.

While the idea came from a demand for personal assistants on SribuLancer, he thought it would be better to launch a new product, with new market positioning. He also wanted to give it a more human touch.

Ryan says that if you want flowers delivered to your girlfriend, ask Diana. If you need a flight from Bali to Jakarta at the lowest price, Diana’s got your back. If you’re looking to rent a car for the week and also lock in concert tickets for the weekend, Diana’s on the case. Essentially, both YesBoss and HaloDiana aim to replicate the business model of US-based Magic, and make it work in Indonesia. Although YesBoss now has deeper pockets, really it’s still anyone’s game, and execution will continue to be the key component going forward.

See: YesBoss is Indonesia’s answer to Magic, gets you anything you desire via SMS

Uber-izing people

YesBoss and HaloDiana have a couple of fundamental differences, particularly when it comes to their plans for scaling. YesBoss CEO Irzan Raditya tells Tech in Asia his firm doesn’t plan to open call centers or go on a hiring spree to handle the influx of inquiries and a waitlist that has “tens of thousands of people” on it. Instead, he plans to build a natural language processor, a type of artificial intelligence built to recognize what folks are asking for, then route inquiries directly to vendors en masse.

HaloDiana, on the other hand, plans to take the more straightforward approach and call upon SribuLancer’s pool of 45,000 remote freelancers to become the voice of Diana. “I’m planning to Uber-ize people,” says Ryan. “We already have a huge pool made up of people behind computers. I think this business — although I’ve only been running it for one month — is very high-touch. It means the inquiries are quite random and quite personalized, which requires a real person to deal with it.”

Ryan says that, depending on the inquiry, HaloDiana will sometimes collect payment from a customer first to make sure the user is actually serious. He clarifies that HaloDiana will never take a percentage from fees collected, but instead simply releases payments in-full to the vendor once the transaction terms are locked in. In contrast, YesBoss doesn’t act as an escrow service between the vendor and the user.

Sometimes the middlewoman