Indonesia’s Kata.ai launches Kata Bot Platform

• The company has managed to grow its revenue by 34 times in a year
• In less than a year, over 26 million people engaged with Kata.ai chatbots

INDONESIAN artificial intelligence (AI) startup Kata.ai introduced its new public-facing Kata Bot Platform that helps developers to create and deploy chatbots with efficiency and ease, freeing up their time to focus on building a conversational user experience.

Kata Bot Platform works by providing developers with a basic production-grade framework that integrates complexity, organisation, infrastructure, and machine learning from the get-go.

Kata.ai chief executive officer Irzan Raditya explains that they wanted to build a scalable and easier platform for developers creating chatbots.

“We also encourage local startups to create their own chatbots through our platform since this new platform is able to handle all of the hard components in creating chatbots and presents them in a neat way.”

Before launching the Kata Bot Platform, Kata.ai provided solution-based business-to-business (B2B) services by utilising AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) in chatbots that speak Bahasa Indonesia.

“Through our enterprises solution, we also provide for the making of chatbots. But for the Kata Bot Platform, we only provide the infrastructure,” said Kata.ai chief marketing officer Reynir Fauzan.

Irzan says that any business that find itself in need of a chatbot service can use the platform, no matter what size the enterprise is.

“Our platform can accommodate up to one million chatbots, so bigger businesses can bring their chatbots into the market via the Kata Bot Platform, while at the same time lowering their costs on tech development and research.”

Kata.ai partnered with Unilever to create a chatbot in LINE named Jemma, a virtual assistant who liaises with customers on behalf of Unilever.

The chatbot has significantly increased the brand’s user engagement, as Jemma has managed to befriend more than 1.7 million LINE users with average chat session lasting around four minutes. One of the longest chat sessions lasted for four hours.

In line with this success, Kata.ai has also been able to penetrate other sectors with its chatbots. It is currently working to adapt its technology for leading businesses in the telecommunications, consulting, banking, and retail industries.

The firm is partnering with Accenture to build a chatbot named Veronika for Telkomsel, an AI-powered virtual assistant designed to help users top-up their prepaid phone credit, purchase data packages, book appointments at the nearest GraPari store, and more.

Future of chatbots

Kata.ai also developed the Kata Bot Platform in line with its vision of empowering a new wave of entrepreneurs in a “post-app” era.

As technology looks forward in terms of what will come next, the company believes that the next big interactive platform between people and technology will inevitably be chatbots.

“Considering that the latest technological revolution has birthed numerous businesses based on apps, we want to spearhead and empower the next wave of entrepreneurs to build the next big thing based on chatbots.

“We call them ‘Botpreneurs’, and our goal as a company is to enable them to grow in the future,” adds Irzan.

In less than one year, the total number of people who engage with chatbots built by Kata.ai has exceeded 26 million, exchanging more than 200 million messages. As a result, the company’s revenue increased by 34 times.

However, when asked about the revenue growth, the team declined to explains more and said that they are focusing on delivering the impact that the Kata Bot Platform can offer.

Related Stories:

Indonesia’s Kata.ai raises US$3.5mil in Series A round

Singapore-based AI company Taiger closes US$5.87mil Series A Round

Putting AI into action

Element AI raises US$102mil; to open SEA hub in Singapore in 2H 2017

For more technology news and the latest updates, follow us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.