Bahasa.ai secures seed funding from East Ventures

By Digital News Asia August 24, 2018

Implements its technology to help businesses execute their chatbot strategy
Mission is to make a machine that understands language in Indonesia comprehensively

Bahasa.ai secures seed funding from East Ventures

BAHASA.AI, an AI as a service company, announced that it has secured an undisclosed amount of seed funding from East Ventures.

The investment will accelerate Bahasa.ai’s mission to build the most robust NLP/NLU (Natural Language Processing/Understanding) engine for language in Indonesia, allowing artificial intelligence to use it with more context and relevance.

Currently, Bahasa.ai implements its technology to help businesses execute their chatbot strategy.

Bahasa.ai chief executive officer Hokiman Kurniawan explained that, two elements must be overcome in making a good chatbot for language in Indonesia, namely, is technology and design.

From the technology side, building the NLP/NLU module for language in Indonesia is a big challenge due to its use of slang words and complicated grammatical structure.

Bahasa.ai has various methods to overcome these obstacles, one of them being a crawler engine that continues to learn the way people use language in Indonesia on social media.

"We also have a special method to overcome semantically repetitive words. For example, the words 'saya, aku, and gue' (meaning ‘me or I' in Bahasa Indonesia) that are semantically similar, can be mapped by our engine so that the chatbot can recognise the conversation contextually," he added.

As for design, Hokiman stressed the importance of having a framework design that enables the chatbot to provide a tangible contribution towards the client's business objectives and help them generate more profits and benefits.

"Although all of the founders are engineers, we always care about how we can be beneficial and bring a positive impact to our clients' businesses. Through our product, companies are empowered to enhance their business transaction process as well resolve customer issues with more efficiency and at any time.

“Clients can also analyse their business and track their chatbot performance through our intuitive and easy-to-use dashboard."

Chief technology officer Fathur Rachman Widhiantoko, says, "Proper implementation and technology for AI chatbots can be very beneficial to businesses. A client of ours, who is a local distribution company, has consistently generated additional revenue of 600 million to 900 million rupiah monthly after implementing our chatbot strategy."

Chief AI Samsul Rahmadani, adds, "In the future, the demand for customers able to interact with the brand as if communicating with friends will be even higher. We need a technology that enables the machine to interact with humans seamlessly, allowing companies to do low-cost and large-scale personal interaction with their customers. Bahasa.ai is here to answer these needs."

"Our mission is to make a machine that understands language in Indonesia comprehensively. We believe that the implementation of this technology doesn't stop with chatbots and there will be more potential coming when the machine can speak the Indonesian language well," Hokiman adds.

East Ventures principal Melisa Irene, says, "Language is a unique heritage for Indonesia. With over 700 dialects spoken in the country, most Indonesians would speak two languages: Bahasa Indonesia and a dialect. This results in many variations of slang, spelling, and abbreviations as we communicate both verbally and in writing, which presents a huge opportunity for NLP/NLU in Indonesia alone. We believe that Hokiman and team have the right mindset, to take a market-fit approach to build technology that would truly understand Indonesian users."