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Haptik Personal Assistant App Introduces Wallet, Promises Response Under 30 Seconds

The app has over two million active users.
Haptik

Haptik, the personal assistant company, has introduced an integrated wallet to pay for services on its popular Haptik 5.0 app that range from booking cabs to movie tickets to flight tickets. Haptik has also redesigned the app's workflow to make it more user friendly.

The Haptik 5.0 app was launched three years ago and boasts a unique combination of artificial intelligence and human responses. For instance, the bot handles simple tasks such as setting the alarm and putting reminders. On the other hand, complex queries such as "Where can I get my dog treated?" or "What is a good restaurant in Bandra for Italian food that has opened recently?" require human intervention. The switch takes place seamlessly however and the customer feels that they are talking to humans all the time.

"We have been working on this update from a long time," Akrit Vaish CEO of Haptik told HuffPost India. "We are aiming to reduce the response time drastically. On an average now, the response time is 20 seconds. Which is phenomenal, because earlier it used to be more than 40 seconds."

"With the rise of Siri and Google Assistant, you have to wonder if AI is now really ready to assist us," Vaish added. "But there are still gaps in terms of natural language processing. In the newest version of Haptik, we have tried to fill that gap by making 85 percent of the queries answered by Artificial Intelligence."

Haptik is currently partnering with 25 services including Zomato, Ola, Bookmyshow, Go iBibo, Urbanclap, and Cleartrip. The wallet's introduction will enable users to book any of these services without leaving the app.

Haptik, meanwhile, has removed the shopping experience from the app stating that they felt that shopping was not optimal for the platform. For a startup to acknowledge what is not working for users is a positive step.

"Conversational Commerce and Chatbots have been the trending topics for a better part of 2016 and we believe that it is all the more relevant for the Indian market which is very different when compared to other developed or emerging markets," Vaish said. "With Indians spending 75 percent of their time on smartphones on a text or chat interface, it has been our endeavour to improve that experience by leveraging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning."

Haptik 5.0 now has over 2 million active users and that figure is growing rapidly. The company is also buoyant about the app's reviews on the Google Play store. With an average rating of 4.55 by over 75,000 reviewers, its rating is amongst the highest in the Indian app space.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.