Chatbots have finally arrived in Southeast Asia

It seems like there’s a chatbot for everything.

Need to know if tomorrow will be sunny or rainy? Hit up SG Weather Bot. Want to book a bus to your location? Strike a conversation with Bus Uncle.

The emergence of chatbots is changing customer service in Southeast Asia, promising consumers instant answers instead of being put on hold for hours on the phone or waiting ages for an email.

While today’s chatbots have clear limitations and aren’t that smart yet, they’re starting to see widespread adoption across industries.

Their value proposition is obvious. Unlike humans, chatbots don’t need to eat, sleep, or get paid overtime. They’re available 24/7, can respond to queries instantly and are easily accessible through a mobile phone. And to top it all off, they’re relatively cheap and easy to produce.

Chatbots have been around since the 1950s, but they only became a common enterprise tool in recent years. The rise of mobile messaging and machine learning (ML) development tools have made chatbots easier to create and more accessible, even to the average person.

A brief history of chatbots in China

While much of early chatbot experimentation and development happened in the West, China wasn’t too far behind.

In 2013, US-based tech titans were competing against each other with their own iterations of voice-based personal assistants like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana.

But China saw a different opportunity. Around the same time, Tencent’s popular messaging app, WeChat launched a tool for developers to create text-based bots on its platform.

As it turned out, WeChat’s move was instrumental in introducing the concept of customer service chatbots as an organic part of the shopping experience. Then in 2015, Alibaba launched AliMe, an intelligent shopping assistant that merchants could use as a virtual shopkeeper.

All of this happened before social media giant Facebook launched chatbots on its platform.

Today, around 600,000 merchants use AliMe. During Alibaba’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival in 2017, AliMe shop assistants had 100 million conversations with customers, 15% of which led to sales.

The same technology is spreading across Southeast Asia. Alibaba-owned ecommerce company Lazada launched an AI-powered chatbot called CLEO (Customer Lazada Engagement Officer) in June 2018. According to the company, 75% of its customer care interactions are handled by CLEO today.

Southeast Asia races to follow suit