The future is in conversational interfaces: Varsha Jagdale on Blaze bot

RecordTV, a Singapore incorporated company, recently launched Blaze – a bot and bot platform in India. Blaze is an AI-based conversational bot that scours the web for the trending news, videos and tweets and helps users discover more. 

Typically, bot is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet. Bot – derived from the word robot – is a software that automates the tasks people would usually do on their own. From simple jobs like fetching information, booking a cab, fixing appointments to complex tasks of talking as a customer care executive, bots have many functionalities. The most common of all bots is the chatbot, which mimics or simulates conversation using artificial intelligence – Siri, Google Allo, Zomato, Zivame, Amazon, to name a few. 

On introducing Blaze to India, Mr. Carlos Fernandes, CEO, Blaze said, “Most people use up to 85% most of their time on barely 3 apps - and one of those apps are messaging. We deliver the convenience of the most trending information delivered to in your Facebook Messenger. That, combined with the democratization of satire through our “Create a Blaze” feature, gives you unprecedented authenticity combined with the pure, unadulterated news and trending information”.

The bot can be added to the Facebook messenger from https://www.blaze.im/.

In conversation with Adgully, Varsha Jagdale, Co-founder, Blaze, speaks at length about the new bot ecosystem, how it aids in content curation, use of Artificial Intelligence, challenges & opportunities, bots as media platforms and more. Excerpts: 

What is Blaze all about and what does it do?
Blaze is a bot and a bot platform which delivers trending content from around the world –News, Videos, Tweets, etc. Blaze is not an app, it doesn’t require a download. It provides you with four options – Buzz, News, Videos and Surprise Me!. It also helps you teleport to a completely different country, where it will link you to a different list of content which is trending. It has two offerings; for Customers and Publishers and it functions differently for each. 

Consumers - Blaze is an AI-based bot, which messages you like a friend on Facebook Messenger. The bot shares information and topics you might be interested in, but also shares fresh, new content that you would normally not discover. The newest, most exciting feature on Blaze will combine news and entertainment - think All India Bakchod and The Times of India combined. 

Publishers - Blaze is also a bot platform: It provides a free bot for every publisher, which is fully configurable. So, if you consider a media company, let’s say “India Today”, for example. Blaze delivers exclusively “India Today” news to users of the bot. Our bot will be better and more intelligent than anything they could ever build, because we know the topics that a user may be interested in across other media bots that we power. To be clear, the news itself is not delivered by the bot - the bot acts like a Google News-like referrer that directs users to the India Today website with news articles, which are then monetised exclusively by India Today. So, media companies don’t have to build their own Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural language, etc. – all they have to do is promote their bot. 

What is the strategy behind its conception and launch?

For Blaze, we have 3 goals:

• To help eliminate echo chambers.
• To help stomp out fake news.
• To help media companies, publishers and content owners leverage AI and text summarization technologies that we offer on a B2B basis. 

Eliminating the echo chamber

We believe that there has been an extremely negative and unintended consequence in the growth of social news. Virtually all the technologies we use today are built around reading and watching what are stories that our friends are reading. As a result, we live in highly polarised echo chambers. A lot of this has to do with technology. In the old days, you would open a newspaper and "chance upon" or "discover" things you never intended to. Today, you get more of the same. This reinforces existing ideas. This is bad for people, and bad for society as a whole... but why do companies do this? Because it is immensely profitable - you are more likely to click on something if you agree with it. 

If you are pro-BJP, you will more likely read "pro-BJP" articles. In psychology, they call is confirmatory bias – you seek our evidence that confirms your views, and your views get reinforced. And the more clicks, the more money they make. We believe that consumers need to discover more. This means discovering opposing views, sometimes on the same topic. We aim to bring different articles together that may have different messages so that the user can decide. We want to empower the user - we don't need to dumb down things for him. 

Discovery and personalisation can sometimes be seen as opposites. You personalise content for a user based on his interests, or do you expand his interests with discovery? What we do is find the most trending topics and present them to the user - helping his discovery of content. Now, over time, we get to know more about you - the categories you like, and we start personalising, but we will personalise topics and interests, not viewpoints. 

Stomping out fake news

This is a hard problem. With all the AI technologies in the world, this is the toughest problem we solve. That’s why we call our technology platform “Human-enhanced AI”. We manually go through thousands of news sources and whitelist sources. Only those sources are then curated and organised by our technology. 

What are the company’s expectations from the Indian market for Blaze?
Bots are new worldwide and it is early days for bots in India. The market is evolving and there are a lot of things we will have to learn along the way. That said, the fundamental premise that consumers are overwhelmed with apps, use only a select few and that the future is in conversational interfaces and AI is unmistakable. So I am quite sure we are correct about the broad themes we are focused on. One of the newer themes we are working on is implementing Augmented Reality features. Stay tuned for that. 

Our services are highly differentiated because we don’t operate in the app ecosystem. We live outside it - in a more intimate environment of the user’s Messenger app. Our interface is a conversational interface which has been labeled as the “next big” thing by Microsoft and Facebook. Today, there is simply no good source of Indian news through a bot. 

Further, while everyone wants to be the destination. We don't want to be the destination. We want to be a launchpad. We want media companies to monetise their ad views because they are generating valuable content. So our business model is B2B - to serve publishers and content owners. 

What are the partnerships in pipeline to curate and distribute content to the consumers?
We are partnering with some of the largest MSO’s in India and South East Asia for our video curation platform. On Blaze, we are focusing on our consumer bot and at the same time initiating conversations with media publishers. Stay tuned on announcements. 

Please elaborate on your growth strategy.
Right now, our product solves a problem of getting your news in one place - where all your messages are. However, we continue to roll out new features regularly. In fact, in the short term we will deliver an experience which will blend entertainment and news in a way that has never seen before. It will be an entirely new take on trending and news information. While I cannot discuss it in detail and how that would look, I can say that if you look at entertainment and news, these are two very different categories. We think we can fuse them. 

What are the challenges and opportunities?
The biggest challenge is to continue innovating and ensuring product-market fit in an evolving market. For every one product we bring to market, we’ve considered at least 10. 

As far as opportunities are concerned, each app has its own user interface, its own on boarding mechanism, and its own learning curve. Consumers want to get "their jobs done" - they don't have an affinity for apps - it's just that apps were the best way 5 years ago. Today, chat bots that work through a conversational interface is the easiest way for one to get the "job done". 

Also, no matter how powerful the phone, consumers have app fatigue - they don't want another app occupying space on their phone, sending them notifications etc. They want things that enhance the functionality of their phones in the most frictionless and lightweight way possible. Adding a chatbot is like adding a contact. No installation or download required; no space on your phone, and instantly (and always) updated. 

Consumers have a finite amount of time and attention and can't be bothered to switch to a new app for everything. For better or worse, users' favorite apps are Facebook, Whatsapp, Messenger, and Instagram - all that happen to be owned by one company, Facebook.The fact that Snap has steered away from its "Snapchat" roots and identifies itself as a camera company is revelatory of Facebook being a platform and not just an app. Adding a bot allows you to get the information you want through the app you most often use - messaging. This results in substantially higher usage rates and interaction. 

How can brands effectively use Bots?
Every brand has an identity. Bots present an opportunity for brands to communicate with their customers or fans in an interactive way, using AI. For example, a brand can engage its customers more deeply through a messaging interface - inform its customers where they can buy its products, help with customer service and support. It is important to note, however, that this does not apply just to product brands, but even to celebrities. Consider Salman Khan and various other Bollywood stars that have launched their own apps. If you think about it - an app - or an application doesn't proximately serve the celebrity. Why do I need an "application" from a Bollywood star? What is it used for? As a fan, I'm interested in knowing more about the star. Perhaps chatting with him. So what if you had a virtual Salman that could respond to his fans’ questions automatically and share public information about him all through a chatbot interface? Perhaps more importantly, Salman Khan could connect directly to his fans through the same interface and surprise his fans. So you could be generally chatting with the virtual version of Salman and sometimes, unbeknownst to you - you could catch the real Salman. 

What about Bots as media platforms?
Websites were replaced by apps. Apps will be replaced by bots. The growth in messaging apps outpaced virtually every category. Messaging is unquestionably the key communication platform for users today. In fact, when you think about it, it has been for a long time - starting with the days of SMS. Businesses want to be part of a conversation with consumers and the best way to do that is to be a contact on the messaging app of choice. When you think about it - bots use the most natural user interface - the interface of language. The ability to understand language as a human does not quite exist with bots today, but through clever conversational interface design and presenting the user with a set of pre-selected responses, one can reduce the amount a user has to type to get to the information he needs. Over time, AI bots will get more sophisticated in their ability to understand natural language, but even now, bots provide far more usable user-interfaces than apps. Facebook, Microsoft and a host of other companies view bots as the future and we are very aligned with that vision. We have seen many platforms come and go - today we see messaging as a platform. It is only a matter of time before media platforms completely shift to bots. 

How are you leveraging Artificial Intelligence?
We call our technology “Human-enhanced AI”. It’s important to note, however, that we don’t use AI alone. We use people for the tasks that get too difficult for AI. Think of us as a search engine coupled with a machine-learning based recommendation engine and a natural language processor combined into one. Our machine learning architect is a Phd from MIT. 

What are the current trends in content curation?
If you look at YouTube, it would take you 30 lifetimes to watch the videos uploaded in a single day. There is just such a large amount of content and it is extremely difficult to manage. At the same time, a tiny sliver is incredibly popular. If you can filter that sliver of content and get the best content, organise it thematically, then that is an incredibly compelling value proposition. That’s what we do with InstantTV. With Blaze we take a similar approach. We use a combination of human beings and AI to curate and organise content. On its own, AI cannot accurately curate content and human beings simply cannot scale with the volume of content. The Human-AI solution is the only way one can balance quality with scale and that’s the premise we live by. 

How it can impact a company’s bottomlines?
Consider an example - Let’s say we provide a bot for the media company. All the links provided on the bot direct exclusively to the media company. We use AI, intelligence and our understanding of the user across the entire bot ecosystem to give him content he might be interested in. 

However, when there are content marketing campaigns, we will offer the media companies a share of revenue, if they are willing to let 3rd party content be available on their bots. Thus, in a nutshell, whenever the bot (that we deliver for free) results in a pageview of the media company’s website, they keep 100 per cent of the revenue. If we find a content marketer that the media company is interested in, then we share the revenue 20:80 (with us getting 20 per cent). 

If they aren’t interested in content marketing, the AI, recommendation technology remains free.