[paragraph]With our exclusive series of Interviews with Indian Business Leaders, this month we are talking with Prima Dona, COO-KeyPoint Technologies. With the growth of AI & Machine Learning technologies, Hyper-contextual experiences and interfaces are evolving rapidly. The following interview gives us insights on challenges of this industry, and how KeyPoint Technologies’s Xploree Keyboard has provided a solution for intent-based discoveries. [/paragraph]
KeyPoint Technologies is an award-winning, global leader in innovative language technology for mobile users.It is a linguistics innovator, in the business of creating smart user experiences, ably headed by a visionary CEO – Sunil Motaparti.
Xploree is a revolutionary and a first-of-its-kind keyboard app in the industry. It reads and interprets users’ intent even as they type in the text. It predicts their needs and instantly connects them to relevant and hyper-contextual deals, offers, products and services. Xploree also offers other features like auto-correct, dictionary, predictive text, stickers, emojis, themes etc.
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Interview – Prima Dona, COO, Keypoint Technologies
Q. Xploree is an interesting approach to push recommendation from the users’ input. While most users don’t understand the underlying AI layer, are you working on ways you can educate users to perform better searches for better precision?
Xploree is not a push recommendation system. It is a user driven, user initiated – contextual recommendation system. Xploree is our AI, NLP technology platform, and Xploree Keyboard is our first offering that integrates this technology. Our technology is capable of understanding intent and context of text inputs and other data be it from a keyboard, app, OS and then deliver relevant recommendations called “discoveries” to users. With Xploree keyboard, we are able to truly have a unique entry path to these discoveries in real-time. Users don’t have to search explicitly during conversations, the AI, NLP technology simplifies the experience by understanding intent before the need to search and serves up interesting related/relevant discoveries.
Q. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are helping build better future for us all, but what are the key challenges of this growing industry, especially for innovation-focused brands like Key Point Technologies?
We steered ourselves in the direction of hyper contextual experiences and interfaces very recently. When we started out, there were challenges to establish the value of the innovation to few ecosystem players, but we stood our ground on the value of our technology to understand intent and context from text, surround data on mobile and build simplified experiences for the user. Today there are a few players, including industry leaders like Google who have invested heavily in such simplified experiences like the Assistants, Search experiences from within their keyboard like GBoard etc. This transition in the ecosystem has helped us move ahead faster as we now have a good first mover advantage.
Q. While the mobile-first approach is performing best for India’s digital companies, what other ‘smart’ platforms Xploree Keyboard can improve? And are you already on any other platforms?
Our core offerings in text prediction have always been multi-OS, multi-device and multi-platform centric. We have built technology portable for Smart TVs, Smart phones, IVIs, Feature phones, RTOS etc. Currently Xploree AI, NLP technologies is integrated with Xploree keyboard on Android smart phones. We have plans to take the solution to other platforms once we reach the expected momentum in the Indian market or basis our customer roadmaps.
Q. With the growing number of user base for your mobile app, how to do you make sure of accuracy in intent prediction, when it comes to Indian Languages like Marathi or Telugu, where the number of user input might be much lower than English?
One essential component that helps improve the quality of intent prediction is the availability of Corpus in different languages. We are constantly improving our language corpus and intent models to ensure we achieve constant positives in accuracy level. Intent analysis broadly from natural language text is a big challenge for not just KeyPoint but for all industry players in the AI, NLP space. There is no single player out there with a solution solving 100% of all user needs. The current focus is to bring in incremental efficiency to users through the output of intent analyser. The journey is challenging but exciting. To be able to do this effectively on the mobile client without sending data to the cloud for processing is a big advantage for KeyPoint. In fact, we may be the only ones doing this effectively on device. A lot of research and analysis over the past few years have gone into building this technology.
Q. Xploree’s intent marketing platform already has big brands like Zomato, Amazon & Flipkart as partners. But how are you planning to tap medium size businesses with the significantly lower digital footprint? (e.g. Hyperlocal Marketplaces, Seller owned small e-commerce portals).
We do have our focus on reaching out to SMEs. It is easier for us to work with SMEs with standard APIs that enables querying of their products/services/content to ensure that the volume of intents expressed by users can be mapped to relevant discoveries. But we also work with them on a case by case basis with our in-house ops team to drive discovery of their offerings through our Discovery Server. We also work with partners with micro services enabled, but again it entirely depends on the scope of the partnership and experience we want to offer to our users. For the Xploree keyboard, our goal is to help users get the most relevant recommendations from the partner apps at the right time, in a non-intrusive way and with the shortest hop.
