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After announcing its hiatus in late September, the Indonesian startup announces a new product that is likely to mark their pivot into a new business model

In September, Indonesian virtual concierge service YesBoss announced that they are gradually shutting down its service; starting from changing its operation hours to finally putting the service on an indefinite hiatus starting from October 31.

The startup has indicated that it is about to launch a new service soon, leading to speculation that YesBoss is pivoting its business model.

Today, the startup finally breaks its silence by announcing a new product called Kata.ai.

Also Read: [Updated] YesBoss acquires Philippines’ HeyKuya, saying yes to regional expansion

Kata.ai is a B2B conversational platform that connects brands and customers using artificial intelligence (AI) tecnnology. In this early version of the product, Kata.ai offers a dialogue engine that allows brands to operate a chatbot that speaks in a character that suits the brand’s “personality”. The chatbot will be able to market products, perform sales transactions, and gather data about consumer behaviour.

Kata.ai will be available on different platforms such as LINE, Facebook, Twitter, BBM, Telegram, and even SMS. It will enter the market as a SaaS product in early 2017.

To build the new platform, YesBoss also announced Jim Geovedi as Technology Advisor for the new project. A UK-based Indonesian cyber-security and Natural Language Processing (NLP) expert, Geovedi had founded, advised, and invested in several Jakarta and London-based tech companies.

Also Read: YesBoss secures seed funding from 500 Startups, IMJ, Convergence

Kata.ai was developed to answer the challenge of providing an AI platform that works well with the complexity of the Indonesian language, an issue that is believed as one of the hurdles in developing the technology in Indonesia.

According to YesBoss CTO Rizqi Meydiarso, the startup learned much from their previous virtual concierge service.

“This understanding will benefit us in training and designing our AI platform through behavioural data from millions of conversation that includes more than 50 commercial fields,” he said.

The post YesBoss is back with the launch of B2B chatbot platform Kata.ai appeared first on e27.

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