Consider WishUp your personal assistant, your secretary, concierge. We leverage local experts and technology to fulfil every one of your requests, on demand from 8 AM to 10 PM.

> wishup.in (@wishupnow)

I met today with the future CTO of WishUp in Bangalore.  WishUp is basically another “mechanical turk” concierge, essentially backed by call center staff; however, they are trying to automate it, one step at a time - using the “do-engine” model, rather than dialog system per se.

He did mention the US based competitors in this sector are getmagicnow.com and gobutlernow.com.  However, in India the sector seems to be heating up; in addition to haptik.co, helpchat.in, and supergenieapp.com previously mentioned above, apparently new entrants include:

- dudegenie.com
- goodservice.in
- loqation.in
- supertextnow.com

Arya is an Artificial General Intelligent Professional Companion to assist humans in taking better decisions.

> arya.ai (Mumbai, Maharashtra)

Founders:

- Vinay Kumar (vinaykumars.com)

- Deekshith Marla (deekshith.me)

> Bengaluru-based Helpchat, a chat-based personal assistant app with operations in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, reportedly laid off around 150 employees on Saturday. (Oct 2015)

Helpchat founder Ankur Singla published a blog post on Sunday explaining the reasons for the layoffs - primarily due to a change in business model from a consumer complaint resolution platform (Akosha), to a personal assistant app.

I’ve only just learned that Creative Virtual maintains an office in Mumbai….

> creativevirtual.com/contact

Creative Virtual Private Limited
105, Kailas Commercial Complex
LBS Marg
Vikhroli (West)
Mumbai – 400 083

> leova.io (@Leova_io) by 17E Technologies Private Limited (17E Tech)

LeovaTravel is the first of our publicly accessible APIs. He comes with his trademark powerful interface for travel applications, fully-configured to be conversational, right-out-of-the-box. The public API comes with generalized, non-specific machine learning for accuracy enhancement.

> onesevene.com (Mumbai, Maharashtra)

We’ve built Leova to be different. His AI is modeled extensively on human conversations; this means that he doesn’t need keywords to make sense of what’s been said, and has the ability to modify previous requests. He is packaged as an easy-to-use, powerful, low-latency API.

Blog: Building AI to Understand Spoken Language at Leova.io (Nikolai Pereira)

We’re building Leova (leova.io), a high-end, accurate and conversational voice API for all developers to access, with zero coding and near plug & play deployment

Videos: YouTube (getLeova)

With the cyborg-like assistant apps now coming out of India, it’s getting harder and harder to tell if they are fully automated, semi-automated, or simply mechanical turks….

> magictiger.com (@MagicTigerApp) Bengaluru, Karnataka

Chat, order anything, get it delivered at your doorstep.

> getyana.com (@GetYanaNow) Gurgaon, Haryana

Message Yana on this number to order food, groceries & almost anything else!

> Virtual assistant Akeira helps farmers boost productivity (Mar 2015)

Umesh Sachdev, co-founder of Uniphore... developed Akeira using speech recognition technology that understands and responds to 24 languages and over 100 dialects.

> uniphore.com/virtual-assistant (IIT Madras Research Park - Chennai, Tamil Nadu)

Akeira provides natural, multi-turn and contextual dialog to consumers across a variety of interaction channels to handle unstructured queries eliminating deep-rooted IVR menus.

References:

> yourstory.com/tag/uniphore

I had a chat with one of the programmers behind Leova recently, they have some serious NLP going on to identify the components of a request (e.g. noun phrases specifying the location), and maintain some form of context across multiple sentences. I wouldn’t immediately call it “conversation” (it’s still like placing an order), but it is pretty impressive for a utility. I hear they’re launching it this month.

> Infosys veteran & Finacle creator Mangipudi Haragopal launches financial services startup FinUNO (Nov 2014)

This will be done by leveraging disruptive technologies, including machine learning, natural language processing and big data analytics, he said.

> fin1.com (@fin1tech) Bengaluru, Karnataka

fin1 is an intelligent assistant platform for financial applications through a near natural interface.

@Don, I’ve also been on the Skype with Leova.  A) I was told two people have created AGI in 18 months.  B) Nothing I could test worked as advertised.  It is very, very common in this space for people to make fantastical claims, yawn.  I wish them luck; but, in this game, seeing is believing….  Were you able to do a demo?  Can you post the transcript, or video?  Or, how about getting your own chatbot to talk to the Leova API? ;^)

I’ve only seen a few older videos like this and this. I understood that this was a virtual assistant with a general NLP engine for use in various domains. Although they use the word “conversational”, I do believe that what they mean by that is that it takes natural language as input, not that it makes casual conversation like a chatbot. As far as I’ve seen it doesn’t talk back.
Hooking up Arckon would be an interesting idea, but he could end up booking a flight by accident.

Nikolai Pereira of leova.io reached out to let me know the problem I encountered has been fixed.  I’ve now been able to properly test Leova via their unlisted Android APK.  I would call it a “do-engine”, or intention recognition, along the lines of the Microsoft Language Understanding Intelligent Service at luis.ai.  It returns visual “cards” like Google Now, rather than proper natural language responses.  And, it does seem to be able to follow a thread for at least several levels, before in my case returning an error message.

> Artificial intelligence start up Arya.ai gets $750,000 funding (Dec 2015)

Arya.ai offers its deep learning algorithms for developers to build intelligent AI systems that can adapt and do multiple things with minimal inputs from humans.

> Paytm Acquires Personal Assistant App Shifu To Improve Its Artificial Intelligence Tech

Shifu will shut down so its 20-member team—including founders Prashant Singh, Deepansh Jain, and Michael Massey—can join different departments at Paytm and work on integrating the app’s technology into products like Paytm’s mobile wallet and online marketplace. Launched in 2013, Shifu billed itself as “your smartphone sidekick” and analyzed how people used their devices so it could make personalized to-do list suggestions and reminders.

References:

- yourstory.com/tag/paytm
- yourstory.com/tag/shifu

> Marcus L Endicott is now organizer for the 500+ member Bangalore Robotics Meetup

FYI, I’m looking for people who want to speak/present face to face in Bangalore/Bengaluru on the topic of robotics, now or in the future, as well as companies who would like to become Sponsors of the Bangalore Robotics Meetup.  Thanks to REVARN™ Cybernetics for being the first sponsor.