GEC NEWS WIREFrom ‘Kore’ perspective, what kind of market shifts have you seen in 2017?
Through August it’s been a promising and productive year for Kore.ai, both from a product and customer standpoint. Our product and engineering teams spent nearly all of 2016 refining and improving the NLP and intelligence capabilities of our Bots Platform, enhancing the developer experience of our Bot Builder tool, and more generally gearing every single aspect of the Platform to meet the highest standards of the Global 2000 enterprises we’re working with. And, we’ve started to see all that work pay-off.
As far as the market shifts are concerned we’ve seen a nice jump in 2017. In 2016, the conversations we were having at trade shows, conferences, and within our office walls were still rudimentary in nature. We’re getting companies coming to us with devoted budgets and timelines for deployment. And overall the market is in a much more educated and prepared space to adopt chatbot technology than it was last year
What have been your latest solution offerings to the modern enterprises and how well do they compete with other solutions in the market?
As I mentioned the entire Kore.ai team, but especially our product development team have brought a handful of new Platform features to life this year. Among them is the ability for chatbots to seamlessly perform live agent hand-offs, which can be especially helpful in retail and service situations. Chatbots can also pause and resume and perform sub-intent recognition, which means they can start a task, receive a separate task, pause the first to complete the more immediate need, and circle back to complete the first task. Sub intent recognition means chatbots built on our Platform have the ability to prioritize intents, meaning the bot can complete more complex requests with multiple intents.
We’ve added a Dialog Builder which allows developers to build complex logic driven workflows in a GUI based tool. It allows them to virtually build any type of custom workflow they’d like. We’ve also new channel integrations such as Workplace by Facebook, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Spark, Glip. These new features and solutions compare favorably with the competition because we combine advanced functionality with a developer and admin-friendly interface to build and manage bots as a complete PaaS offering.
What has been your go-to-market strategy for the Middle East? What kind of partner engagement strategies are you working on?
Our go-to-market strategy is direct as well as through select partners. The partner engagement strategies of Kore.ai for the Middle East Market is based on global partners such as Accenture and CapGemini as well as local partners in the region. Kore.ai is also working very closely with OEM partners such as SAP in the Middle East market.
What roadmap do you have for the last quarter of 2017?
Some of our big features on the roadmap are some cool new channels like Amazon Echo, Skype For Business, and Yammer, multi-language NLP support including German and Spanish, and we are also working to import a tool for API.ai/LUIS.ai/Watson/Amazon Lex to Kore.ai, and to use other speech APIs from Amazon, Watson, etc. which will help integrate existing services completely within the Platform.
