Danang Fantasticity, one of Hekate’s chatbot products, helps to bring tourists closer to the city. (Photo: VNA)Da Nang (VNS/VNA) - Since November 2017, visitors to thecentral coastal city of Da Nang have been able to easily access to alltourism-related information via a smartphone-based app called DanangFantasticity, which incorporates a smart chatbot.
Danang Fantasticity was developed by Hekate, atechnology start-up which grew out of the local business incubator named DNES.
Its co-founders, Nguyen Minh Duc, 27, Pham QuocHuy, 27 and Duong Phuoc Thien, 25, became close friends at university. Togetherthey left their former jobs, which were considered stable, to pour their heartand soul into developing chatbot applications.
A chatbot is an AI-based piece of software whichis designed to simulate human’s conversational behaviour and is used fordifferent purposes including customer service and information acquisition.
It was only in 2016, at a conference forMicrosoft developers, that their technology was introduced.
“Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, said thatchatbots are a combination of AI and smartphone users’ behaviour. The passionfor innovation was then the main motivation to drive us forward, digging intothis field,” Duc told Tien Phong (Vanguard)newspaper.
Sumi, a chatbot running on Skype, atelecommunications application, was among their first products. The artificialassistant Sumi knows how to chat, troubleshoot and help users in many fields.Moreover, it is integrated with other applications including news or photoediting.
“On the first day launching our marketingforums, Sumi immediately went viral with 1,000 people starting conversation.Some even thought that it was a real person,” he added.
In April 2016, after Facebook’s CEO MarkZuckerberg announced the integration of chatbot technology into the firm’sMessenger application, they decided to develop Sumi for the application andapproached 40,000 users in just one month.
Counting both Skype and Messenger, until now,Sumi has interacted with more than a billion people around the world.
With such a bright start, at the end of 2016,they leaned further into the field with the establishment of Hekate, a companyspecialising in chatbot tech.
“Young people nowadays are interested inchatting online and using social networks. Therefore, we think chatbots willbecome a new development trend that startups all share. Furthermore, chatbotsshows their outstanding advantages in providing quick and continuous responsesto customer queries, as well as helping to reduce labour cost. Therefore,besides Sumi, we also offer different types of chatbot which can be flexiblyused in business, services, finance and customer management,” Thien said.
Hekate’s products have been used at severallocal and international events to answer participants’ questions and demands.Hekate’s chatbot was chosen to be the tourism information app. This helped makeDa Nang the second city in South East Asia, following Singapore, using chatbottechnology in public services.
“Using Danang Fantasticity, tourists can accessall information about the city, from weather and traffic to local hot spots, attheir fingertips,” said Duc.
According to Da Nang City People’s Committee, in2017, the city welcomed 6.7 million visitors, of which foreign touristsaccounted for 34 percent.
At the time the application was piloted, therewere 10,000 people from 12 countries using the chatbot. In April 2018, DanangFantasticity became the city’s official tourism app.
Besides developing chatbots for businesspurposes, Hekate has demonstrated their desire to spread the values of thisinnovation by launching Messnow, a chatbot platform without coding, in June2017.
Following some simple steps, anyone can createtheir own chatbot to answer messages automatically on Facebook Messenger.
“With this platform, one can create a chatbot injust five minutes. Messnow offers several templates for different businessareas – hotels, restaurants or cafés for example,” Huy said.
After six months, 5,000 chatbots have beencreated using Messnow, reaching up to two million people.
“Compared with foreign-developed platforms,Messnow is friendlier to Vietnamese users. Furthermore, as it is multi-lingualwith about 30 languages available at the moment and able to learn fromconversations with customers, the more it interacts, the more natural itsanswers will be. We believe that Messnow can help enterprises answer allquestions that their customers have,” said Duc.-VNS/VNA
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