They developed Cortana for MS, now they help businesses build AI chatbots in minutes

Photo credit: Robin Zebrowski

FreshMenu is one of India’s most popular food delivery apps. But these days, it also has a chatbot on Facebook Messenger to interact with you and take your orders. Many find this an easier and more natural way than going to a website or rummaging through multiple apps on the phone.

When you search for FreshMenu on FB Messenger, you get a “Hello, I’m FreshMenu Bot…” which starts by showing you the day’s menu. Facebook opened up Messenger for business chatbots earlier this year, and FreshMenu is one of the early birds to use the platform.

Interestingly, FreshMenu did not need a tech team to build its chatbot which has an AI engine at the backend for natural language processing and responding intelligently to messages – well, most of the time! It used the services of Bangalore-based AI startup MindIQ which promises to help you build your own AI-powered chatbot in seven minutes.

The do-it-yourself AI bot builder platform has been in private beta with early adopters like FreshMenu. Today, in a few hours, it comes out in public beta for everyone to use.

What’s more, MindIQ will let you build your own bots not only for Facebook Messenger, but also other platforms like Telegram, Slack, or even WhatsApp if it opens up to bots. It also provides you with a unified dashboard to manage chats on multiple channels.

Where chat beats apps

Chat is a new paradigm for connecting with customers or users. “In the web and app world, the interactions are live. But in the chat world, the messages are never lost. I have time to collate them and then take the necessary actions,” points out Anup Reghunathan, CEO and co-founder of the bootstrapped MindIQ which now seeks seed funding to scale up.

In India, a lot of small merchants – including Anup’s milkman – take customer orders on WhatsApp. Anup expects WhatsApp to open up to chatbots soon, like FB Messenger did. “This will be a game changer,” he says, “because everybody is already on WhatsApp, and much more comfortable with chats than with using apps.”

As many as 130 million out of India’s 153 million social media users are on mobile, and they’re spending a majority of their time on chat apps. So naturally, businesses want to be there too. This is especially true for small and medium businesses who can’t afford to invest in sophisticated ecommerce tools or the marketing push to get people to download and use apps.

With AI bots, these businesses will be able to aggregate their chat messages from customers. This will help them scale better and be more efficient with chat commerce. A local store, for instance, can put its inventory on the bot, so a customer will know if coconut oil is unavailable without wasting a trip to the store or calling it up. And when the coconut oil does become available, she gets notified.

130 million out of India’s 153 million social media users are on mobile, and they’re spending a majority of their time on chat. Businesses want to be there too.

MindIQ’s AI engine not only interprets messages and responds to them, but also learns to predict the next step the customer is likely to take. The FreshMenu bot, for example, can cue the user to track his order once it has been placed, because that’s the most likely action to follow.

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