How people are turning to chatbots to tackle love, depression
BENGALURU: When 27-year old Mayank Ranka is looking for love, he turns to a chatbot. “It instantly finds me a match which is all I need at the end of the day. The even better part is I can end the conversation anytime I want and not chat ever again,” says Mumbai-resident Mayank, who works with an event company in Mumbai.
Tech-savvy singles like Mayank don’t blink before using a speed-dating chatbot like Neargroup which helps them zoom into the right date. The chatbot’s in-built AI helps the user to find the right match based on nearby locations, interests and also conversations.
Once a match is made, a user can start chatting anonymously till he or she is interested in disclosing personal details or end the conversation, leaving no thread behind. “Study says that women find 80% of the men unattractive in pictures. Women prioritise personality, intelligence and smartness over pictures. Noting this, we started this speed-dating chatbot,” says Prashant Pritti founder of NearGroup.
Bengaluru-based Touchkin’s chatbot Wysa helps individuals combat depression. The pro-active penguin chatbot has been designed to understand one’s mood, track emotions, and then motivate through mindfulness meditation or through exercises. Enabled to track activity from smartphone and sleep patterns, the chatbot creates weekly reports that give an overall summary of how one has been doing the entire week.
“At present, chatbots are quite underutilised but they will go far beyond text. Along with building close customer and brand relationships, a conversational interface like chatbots’, which are interactive and inclusive, will make technology far more accessible,” said Ramakant Vempati, who cofounded Wysa with his spouse, Jo Aggarwal.
“In the near future, a combination of interactive voice response (IVR) technology and generative chatbots will bring a new way of consuming information,” said Jo Aggarwal.
Physcologists believe that chatbots like Wysa are useful. “At 3 am when one eagerly wants to talk to someone to evade loneliness, such tools can be very effective. Tools like these have even helped a few who were battling suicidal thoughts,” says psychologist Smriti Sawhney Joshi.
Chatbots are also helping visa applicants. Visabot, developed by Andrey Zinoviev and Artem Goldman, was launched around November last year and helps applicants with the process of procuring US visa which includes B-2 tourist visas and O-1visas.
After asking few questions like nationality, and purpose of visit, the bot suggests the apt visa and then asks for all the relevant documents and fills out the forms and checks if all is in order, saving time so one can readily send it to the embassy.
In three months, the bot has been used by 40,000 people from regions including Middle East, Europe and countries including Latin America, India and China. By end of this year, Visabot plans to monetise by rendering assistance to businesses with visas like the H-1B. “The timing of course just couldn’t be better,” says Andrey Zinoviev.
Moreover, Visabot is also helping the undocumented people living in the US who are eligible for protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, also known as “dreamers”.
Tech-savvy singles like Mayank don’t blink before using a speed-dating chatbot like Neargroup which helps them zoom into the right date. The chatbot’s in-built AI helps the user to find the right match based on nearby locations, interests and also conversations.
Once a match is made, a user can start chatting anonymously till he or she is interested in disclosing personal details or end the conversation, leaving no thread behind. “Study says that women find 80% of the men unattractive in pictures. Women prioritise personality, intelligence and smartness over pictures. Noting this, we started this speed-dating chatbot,” says Prashant Pritti founder of NearGroup.
Bengaluru-based Touchkin’s chatbot Wysa helps individuals combat depression. The pro-active penguin chatbot has been designed to understand one’s mood, track emotions, and then motivate through mindfulness meditation or through exercises. Enabled to track activity from smartphone and sleep patterns, the chatbot creates weekly reports that give an overall summary of how one has been doing the entire week.
“At present, chatbots are quite underutilised but they will go far beyond text. Along with building close customer and brand relationships, a conversational interface like chatbots’, which are interactive and inclusive, will make technology far more accessible,” said Ramakant Vempati, who cofounded Wysa with his spouse, Jo Aggarwal.
“In the near future, a combination of interactive voice response (IVR) technology and generative chatbots will bring a new way of consuming information,” said Jo Aggarwal.
Physcologists believe that chatbots like Wysa are useful. “At 3 am when one eagerly wants to talk to someone to evade loneliness, such tools can be very effective. Tools like these have even helped a few who were battling suicidal thoughts,” says psychologist Smriti Sawhney Joshi.
Chatbots are also helping visa applicants. Visabot, developed by Andrey Zinoviev and Artem Goldman, was launched around November last year and helps applicants with the process of procuring US visa which includes B-2 tourist visas and O-1visas.
After asking few questions like nationality, and purpose of visit, the bot suggests the apt visa and then asks for all the relevant documents and fills out the forms and checks if all is in order, saving time so one can readily send it to the embassy.
In three months, the bot has been used by 40,000 people from regions including Middle East, Europe and countries including Latin America, India and China. By end of this year, Visabot plans to monetise by rendering assistance to businesses with visas like the H-1B. “The timing of course just couldn’t be better,” says Andrey Zinoviev.
Moreover, Visabot is also helping the undocumented people living in the US who are eligible for protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, also known as “dreamers”.
