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

YesBoss team

Techies in Indonesia love to wax lyrical on how prevalent mobile phones are in the country, with a mobile penetration rate of around 130 percent. But often what they fail to mention is that the majority of those users are still on feature phones (dumb phones), not smartphones.

Data subscriptions are on the rise, but SMS is still the preferred choice for many people. More than two thirds of Indonesians use SMS at least once a week.

One startup that’s using SMS in a clever way is YesBoss. The firm offers a virtual assistant that will help you out with anything you need, all via SMS requests. The concept is a lot like the US-based Y Combinator startup Magic, a company that will get you anything you want, as long as it’s not illegal (Disclosure: Y Combinator also invests in Tech in Asia. See our ethics page).

The goal of YesBoss is for users to no longer hunt for Pizza Hut’s phone number, go to the hardware store, or even buy things online. This is an interesting value proposition, as many working-class Indonesians don’t have access to the internet. Instead, users just text whatever their heart desires to one dedicated phone number, and – poof! – the item appears.

See: Magic, America’s hottest startup, has a perfect business model for Asia

Right now the service is free

YesBoss is a brand new startup. It launched at the beginning of this month, but in order to keep the user base manageable, the service can only be accessed by those who sign up for an invitation. At the moment, there are 849 invitations still available.

Tech in Asia gave YesBoss a whirl last week. We started with something simple, asking what the weather was going to be like, and soon enough graduated to ordering  food and taxis. We’re pleased to report that each inquiry has worked out for us so far. While YesBoss is currently free to use, users are still subject to normal phone credit fees. Of course, this would happen anyway if you wanted to order a pizza by phone, for example. In the grand scheme of things – and having bilateral freedom to get whatever you want – prepaid phone credit seems like a negligible price to pay if YesBoss can actually make your life significantly easier.

On average, YesBoss’s virtual assistant will reply to your inquiry within four to seven minutes. However, the more difficult or complex the inquiry, sometimes it can take up to 30 minutes to get a response. If it’s a question you’d like to know the answer to, some users might just prefer to use Apple’s Siri, Google Now, or just find a wifi connection and browse the web. However, for us, part of the fun was waiting to see what kind of answers YesBoss would come up with, so there was somewhat of a suspense element at play.

Interestingly enough, a lot of the responses were very human, which led us to believe that there’s at least one warm body on the other end. In terms of building a product that scales, YesBoss will either have to outsource to some kind of call center, or perhaps build an army of artificially intelligent robots to send text messages all day.

But seriously, artificial intelligence