Press Release

Jakarta, 5 November 2019 – As one of the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology in Indonesia. Kata.ai is holding today (5/11) the INTERACT 2019, an annual event to introduce the latest innovations and provide a forum to discuss the developments and benefits of conversational AI technology, namely ones that focus on human conversation/language to facilitate interactions between computers and humans.

At this event, Kata.ai introduced the Integrated Conversational Platform that consists of our ten latest products. INTERACT 2019 is also the final round of KataHack 2019, which was an event for developers in Indonesia to compete in making solutions to solve various problems using the platforms and tools provided by Kata.ai.

Irzan Raditya, the CEO and Co-Founder of Kata.ai, hopes that the use of Kata.ai’s technology can encourage developments of new AI-based solutions in Indonesia. "We want our technology to be an enabler or supporter, where business players or developers can utilize it to develop solutions to the problems that they face." Irzan said.

We believe that business sectors in Indonesia encounter many challenges that it is impossible to master all of them on our own, but by providing our technology in the form of a "developer platform", we can work together with developers, businesses people, and experts in these various sectors to build relevant solutions. Particularly, we will be focusing on the healthcare, financial services, education, and social commerce sectors in the future." he added.

For this reason, Kata.ai has updated the Kata Platform product to become an integrated conversational platform. Unlike the previous platform that solely focused on chatbot building, the new and updated Kata Platform was developed to be a one-stop solution for developing and managing various conversational AI solutions, ranging from conversation management, development of virtual assistants for businesses, integration between chatbots and customer service operations, creating voice-based virtual assistants, to managing marketing campaign activities.

These features are designed to create solutions that can facilitate interactions with users through speech by voice. Kata Platform now consists of ten main products with new and more specific features, namely:

1. Kata Flow: A chatbot development platform for creating enterprise-grade virtual assistants

2. Kata NL: A Natural Language model development platform that can aslo process insights from conversation data

3. Kata CMS: A platform where users can develop a dashboard to manage and organize all contents in a chatbot

4. Kata Generator: A platform to quickly create, label, and train Natural Language datasets

5. Kata Boost: A platform for managing marketing campaigns in a chatbot

6. Kata Voice: A platform to develop voice-based interactive virtual assistants

7. Kata Omnichat: A dashboard that combines customer service processes management by human agents and chatbot in one workflow

8. Kata Assist: A feature to help customer service agents respond to customers questions faster with AI-powered answer recommendations

9. Business Dashboard: A dashboard to manage and automate large scale conversations on WhatsApp

10. Catalog: A feature to find and use solutions that have been previously developed by Kata Platform developers.

The INTERACT 2019 event also serves as the final round of the KataHack 2019 competition, which started on October 14 with more than 200 developers in 84 teams from all over Indonesia participating. The five best teams were then selected to be the finalists who offered various solutions, namely:

1. Patricia - Personal Payment Assistant A chatbot that can help people in managing financial matters and schedule bill payments in chat apps

2. Snowball - KRAVE A chatbot that can help you plan a vacation that fits your budget more practically

3. EasyFish - AdBoard Interactive billboards with text-to-speech capabilities

4. Elea - Elea Bot A chatbot that can provide tech-based help to people who are dealing with mental illnesses or problems

5. A4 - Oti Parenting Bot A chatbot that can help parents in controlling and preventing negative conversations in a group chat with chatbot automation.

Pria Purnama, VP of Product and Engineering of Kata.ai, said that "Kata Hack 2019 is a national online hackathon competition that was initiated to train young developers in Indonesia in critical thinking, creativity, and ignite their spirit for problem-solving with AI-based solutions. We challenged them to be creative in solving business or technology problems that we saw with comprehensive solutions developed using the platforms and tools that we provide. We hope that we can encourage more young people to understand and explore the application of AI as a potential solution to various problems faced by the society."

Kata.ai was established since 2016, and the Kata Platform has been used by thousands of developers to create more than 7,000 chatbots. To date, more than 140 companies from 16 different industries have used Kata.ai’s platform. In 2019, the company’s annual recurring revenue has increased by more than 500 percent compared to 2018.

Among all the chatbots were ones developed by more than 30 well-known companies from various industries, such as Telkomsel, Unilever, Indosat Ooreedoo, Hutchison 3 Indonesia, Bank BRI, Alfamart, CIMB Niaga, and Pegadaian.