Meet the men behind Niki, the chat-bot you can leave your mundane tasks to

The bot enables computers to do the humdrum tasks like booking cabs, buying tickets, and paying bills and insurance premiums

Sachin Jaiswal was never destined to work for someone, no matter how big the employer was. After graduating from IIT-Kharagpur in 2011, he landed a job in Oracle, one of the most revered technology companies globally. But what might have been a dream job for his peers, seemed too mundane for him.

He quickly called it a day, and together with friends from college, co-founded InnovAccer, a data mining and analytics company in Noida. It is here that Jaiswal acquired the skills and idea to delve deep into the world of artificial intelligence and natural language processing, the core on which his new company Niki.ai has been formed.

At InnovAccer, Jaiswal and his team went through several interesting assignments. One time a Ph.D researcher from George Town University hired the firm to map instances of hate speech on social media. Another time, they developed a product that would sift through US stock exchanges filings -— typically annual reports -— to accumulate competitive data for the clients.

Natural language processing or NLP, which is the ability of a computer to make sense of speech - written or oral - and respond accordingly, became a great tool for InnovAccer. The company began excelling at identifying relevant text data, pulling it out, presenting it in a logical manner and helping the consumer with insights.

“It was my first hands-on experience with data analytics. We would help researchers from top US universities mine data to understand sentiments for a product or service,” he tells this reporter over a meeting at Niki.ai’s office in Koramangala, Bengaluru.

It’s also where Jaiswal decided where he wanted to be a serial entrepreneur. When InnovAccer decided to focus only on the healthcare sector, with clients largely in the US, he decided to step out and use everything he’d learnt about NLP to build a product relevant to India’s massive digital population.

Jaiswal got together with three other friends from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, to launch Niki.ai, one of the earliest chat-bot companies in India. It has been 18 months since the roll out of its first product and today, the company’s virtual assistant is being used by over 10 banks and several other enterprises for conversations with their customers.

Niki.ai is enabling computers to do the humdrum tasks that humans once did, and the consensus in the market is that it is doing quite a great job.

Like other startup stories, the journey of Niki.ai started out of a flat in Bengaluru shared by Jaiswal and his IIT-K batchmate Shishir Modi. The duo was joined by Keshav Prawasi and Nitin Babel, also from IIT-K, to launch the company.

Jaiswal says he brought tons of project-based experience on NLP that gave him a clearer vision of what he wanted the product to be.

“With Niki, we are not creating an assistant that does single-query items like set an alarm or do Google search, we are creating an agent that Indian users can employ to buy a service. It’s like an agent to whom people go to book things like tickets, pay bills or insurance premiums,” he says.

Users interact with Niki.ai over texts or voice as though they are conversing with a person on the other end. The bot assists users in services like booking a cab or a bus, paying bills and a host of other things. It is available as a standalone app and is also integrated in chat-bots of Indian banks.

Jaiswal believes that ‘voice’ will be the next major trend in technology as more and more people engage with internet over voice. That also puts Niki.ai in a sweet spot in India’s internet journey. Several first-time users are coming on to the internet because of cheap smartphones and data, and these users, with less knowledge on how to navigate on a smartphone, will use voice inputs to do tasks.

“The estimate is that by 2021, close to 738 million Indians will come online, and half a billion of them may not know how to read and write in English. For these new internet users, voice is going to be a huge enabler, especially in a market like India,” added Jaiswal.