23 August 2018

JAKARTA, 23 August 2018 — Bahasa.ai, an AI as a service company, announced earlier today that it had secured an undisclosed amount of seed funding from East Ventures. The investment will accelerate Bahasa.ai mission to build the most robust NLP/NLU (Natural Language Processing/Understanding) engine for the Indonesian language, allowing artificial intelligence to use Indonesian language with more contextual and relevant. Currently, Bahasa.ai implements its technology to help businesses execute their chatbot strategy.

CEO of Bahasa.ai Hokiman Kurniawan explained, two elements must be overcome in making a good chatbot in the Indonesian Language, which is technology and design.

From the technology side, building the NLP/NLU module for Indonesian Language has a big challenge due to its dynamics of slang words and complicated grammatical structures. Bahasa.ai has various machines to overcome these obstacles, one of them is a crawler engine that continues to learn the way people use the Indonesian language 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 chatbot can recognize the conversation contextually,” he adds.

As for design, Hokiman stressed the importance of having a framework design that enables chatbot to provide a tangible contribution towards the client’s business objectives and help them to generate more profits and benefits. In Bahasa.ai, the focus of its products and services development is on answering customers need.

“Although all of the founders are engineers, we always care about how we can be beneficial and bring positive impact to our clients’ businesses,” he says, “through our product, companies are powered to enhance their business transaction process as well resolve customer issues with more efficiency and at any time. Even further, clients can analyze their business and track their chatbot performance through our intuitive and easy-to-use dashboard.”

Fathur Rachman Widhiantoko, the CTO, says, “Proper implementation and technology for AI chatbots can be so much beneficial to businesses. A client of ours, who is a local distribution company, has consistently generated additional revenue for IDR 600 Mio to 900 Mio monthly after implementing our chatbot strategy.”

Samsul Rahmadani, the Chief AI, 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 the machine that understands the Indonesian language comprehensively. We believe that the implementation of this technology doesn’t stop on chatbot only and there will be more potential coming when the machine can speak the Indonesian language well”, Hokiman adds.

Melisa Irene, Principal of East Ventures, says, “Language is a unique heritage for Indonesia. With over 700 dialects spoken in the country, most Indonesians would speak the dual language: Bahasa Indonesia and a dialect. This results in many variations of slangs, spellings, and abbreviations as we communicate in both verbal and 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.”

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