Intelligent Ticks, the ticks anybody using any chat app will be familiar with – These are the ticks that let you know if your message has been sent, delivered and read. These tiny, innocuous color changing ticks inspired Himanshu Gupta and sparked the idea for his start-up IntelliTicks.

IntelliTicks provides chat and voice bot solutions and as of now, they have found a good market for themselves in the lead generation space. Himanshu highlights amazing numbers showcasing the impact which their solution has had. (10X growth in lead generation, 70-80% savings on the customer service front.. and more!)

Everybody uses WhatsApp

For people who are not very technology savvy, senior/elderly population – even though they might not be comfortable using many mobile apps, but a lot of them are still using WhatsApp in addition to the basic phone call functionality. This trend strongly suggests that a large chunk of the population is more comfortable using conversational agents than other forms of UI.

The entire space of chatbots, voicebots is an attempt to ride this trend.

Chatbots – How intelligent are they?

For ‘closed’ scenarios, where the options/possibilities of the questions/replies that can come into play are limited and the conversational space has clear boundaries, chatbots perform really well. However, for open ended situations, we are still far from any form of perfection. Sci-fi movies show us a picture of where we can be in the future – super intelligent chat systems, remember TARS from Interstellar?

In the present context, for any start-ups in the Chatbots space, Himanshu gives a very important suggestion – When selling, make sure your customer has the right expectations from the solution. This is a useful tip to ensure that post the sale, the customer isn’t dissatisfied – Most customers, at first, imagine chat-bots to be Sci-fi like, all intelligent beings.

What does it take to build a Chatbot

For anyone considering to start-up in this space, they don’t necessarily have to be all knowledgeable about AI and ML. Most of the fundamental research is being done by large companies like Google, IBM, Microsoft etc. One needs intelligent people, who can use APIs from these larger companies and then tweak around to build a solution that fits the context under consideration. Having said this, although you don’t have to go down to fundamental research level, having a strong hold on software engineering and an understanding of AL/ML APIs and their use-cases helps a lot.

Chatbots and Ethics

Chatbots sometimes can sound very realistic. This brings up the ethical question that if the user should be informed in advance whether they are chatting with a human or a bot. Informing users that they are chatting with a bot can reduce the credibility of the conversation, on the other hand, not informing them can be deception in a way. Himanshu advises that users should be informed that they are chatting to a chat bot as far as possible. Himanshu’s mantra is – transparency always helps.

If you are starting up, for advice on chatbots, feel free to reach out to Himanshu on LinkedIn or via email – himanshu.gupta@intelliticks.com

Visit IntelliTicks at: https://www.intelliticks.com

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