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Kata.ai Launches KataHack National Hackathon to Seek New AI Innovations

Jakarta, 1 Oktober 2019 - Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a rising trend in technology and is constantly being discussed worldwide. Along with the progress of the times, AI technology has been increasingly relevant and is now being used by various companies and brands to interact with their customers, including serving all their questions and needs directly through the virtual space. One of the leading developers of AI technology in Indonesia is Kata.ai.

Kata.ai is a homegrown technology startup that provides Indonesian language chatbot solutions for businesses using AI and Natural Language Processing technologies. In just three years after being founded, Kata.ai now has around 6,000 chatbot developers in Indonesia entrusted with developing chatbots for various well-known companies, ranging from Telkomsel (Veronika), Indosat (INDIRA), Unilever (Jemma), Alfamart (Shalma), to Bank Rakyat Indonesia (Sabrina).

Irzan Raditya, CEO and founder of Kata.ai, believes in the potential for livelihood improvement that AI technology can bring to Indonesia. "Indonesia is a very potential market to realize the benefits of chatbots, given the high penetration rate of mobile and messaging technology. We believe that AI solutions can also advance our human resources so that they can do more meaningful work and ultimately improve their overall quality of life," he said.

To accelerate the development and innovation of AI solutions in Indonesia, Kata.ai took the initiative to hold KataHack, an online national hackathon. Registration for the KataHack competition is open from September 27 to October 10, 2019. In the event, which is open to the public, participants are invited to compete in teams to solve business and technology-related problems with AI-based solutions developed using Kata.ai’s platform and technology.

"Apart from this competition, Kata.ai’s platform can also be used by anyone, including tech enthusiasts and students, to experiment and create their own chatbots," said Irzan.

Pria Purnama, Vice President of Product & Engineering of Kata.ai, said "the goal of KataHack is to groom young talents in Indonesia, particularly in developing their critical thinking, creativity, and the spirit of problem-solving with AI solutions. We want to invite them to be creative and develop comprehensive solutions to business or other IT problems that we often encounter on a daily basis. We hope that we can encourage more young people to understand and explore the application of AI to various business sectors in Indonesia."

In order to register to KataHack, the teams need to submit a proposal in the form of a simple pitch deck that contains their personal information, a brief explanation of their AI solution, product and technical specifications, as well as what Kata.ai technology that they will use to develop their solution.

"If they pass the pitch deck proposal selection, participants can immediately work on their solution idea within two weeks, from October 14 to 24, 2019. Participants will be addressed based on originality, business or social value, use of Kata.ai technology, and how they implement the AI solution that they proposed," Pria said.

Despite the vital role that AI plays in supporting a more advanced economic potential, its adoption in Indonesia is still relatively low. A study conducted by Microsoft and IDC Asia/Pacific shows that only 14% of organizations in Indonesia have adopted AI technology. This is due to many skeptical views that are still present regarding the performance of AI in the country.

Irzan, Pria, and the team at Kata.ai saw the low adoption rate as a challenge to gain the trust of the business community. As a pioneer in developing AI-based solutions, Kata.ai has succeeded in creating and developing chatbot services for several large companies in the country. The latest chatbot that was developed with Kata.ai’s technology is INDIRA from telecommunication giant Indosat Ooredoo. The chatbot that was launched on this year’s National Customer day has significantly reduced wait times for customer queries response and directly increased customer satisfaction with Indosat Ooredoo’s services.

More than 600,000 people have interacted with and use chatbots built with Kata.ai’s platform every month. In addition, Kata.ai also recorded more than 580 million interactive messages exchanged between chatbots and users. These numbers show that people in Indonesia are for wider adoption of AI technology.

"At Kata.ai, we believe that artificial intelligence is an important key to increasing productivity and cost-efficiency in doing business. Through this hackathon, we want to speed up the development and adoption of AI in Indonesia so that it is not inferior to other countries, especially now that Indonesia is known as the home of hundreds of high-potential tech startups. Therefore, we want to use this momentum to improve the skills and talents of young Indonesians in AI development," said Irzan.

For more information on the KataHack competition, participants can visit KataHack 2019 registration site at https://blog.kata.ai/en/post/katahack-2019. Every person/team can participate free of charge. The judging will be conducted by two experts from Kata.ai: Pria Purnama as Vice President of Product and Engineering and Gelar Pradipta Utama as Head of Product, along with several other judges that will be announced soon. The five teams with the best ideas will be selected to present their solutions at the INTERACT event on November 4-5, 2019, and the winners of KataHack will get a total prize of Rp 40 million.

About Kata.ai

Kata.ai is a Conversational AI company that focuses on developing technology that can understand human conversations naturally, enabling better and more productive interactions between humans and computers. Kata.ai’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology has been used to develop chatbots from major companies in Indonesia, such as Telkomsel, Indosat Ooreedoo, Unilever, Bank BRI, Alfamart, CIMB Niaga, Pegadaian, and Midtrans (Gojek Group).

Kata.ai’s Kata Platform can also be used to easily develop chatbots that are rich in functionality, enabling established companies as well as small and medium enterprises to develop their own chatbots for various messaging applications.

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