KOCHI:Ever thought of having a virtual guide who can act on your whims and fancies and help you with almost all your online needs. Here comes Viki to your aid. Viki can interact with human beings as a customer care interface and help resolve almost all the queries of a customer. Using your voice as input, Viki can send messages and mails from your mobile, place calls, post on social networks, schedule meetings, operate any other applications, choose a movie, find a restaurant, get updated with the news, weather etc.
The story of Viki goes like this: “As part of our final year project at the Sree Narayana Gurukulam College of Engineering, at Kadayirupu, we developed a humanoid robot with artificial intelligence (AI). Viki, the software part of the robot which can interact with human beings using users’ voice, was its brain,” says Anoop Balakrishnan, CEO and co-founder of Agrima Infotech.
With nine enthusiastic and young minds with a penchant for designing, programming and technology team Agrima got incubated at Startup Village, Kochi in 2012.
“To take the intelligent brain of Viki to the next level, we developed a virtual personal assistant app named Viki exclusively for BlackBerry devices in 2013. This mobile application has a client behaviour algorithm which adapts to the user’s individual preferences over time and personalises the results. Viki give answers for your question through a natural language user interface. Designed with a user friendly interface, Viki displays the live voice chats as conversations which makes things easy for BlackBerry users,” he adds.
Now, the techbuffs of Agrima infotech are on a mission to integrate Viki with customer care/call centres of various mobile and other service providers by introducing a virtual customer care executive.
“Viki can interact with human beings as a customer care official. It can solve almost all the queries of a customer based on the power of artificial intelligence and natural language processing. With Viki, what we aim is to reduce users’ effort to a great extent,” says Arun Ravi, vice-president, business operations.
Accolades
Agrima Infotech has been chosen as a ‘Great Tech Rocketships’ winner. The ‘Great Tech Rocketships’ initiative is a collaboration between UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) and TechHub, supported by IAN and iSpirt. It has been designed to identify impressive and nascent companies and ideas that have the potential to transform into fast-moving and hyper-growth. “The panel has selected Agrima as one of the final five from the 289 applicants across India,” says Nikhil Dharman, CTO and co-founder of the firm.
The company with three co-founders and six staff is now all set to find various applications for Viki in the day-to-day aspects of human interaction.