Orahi, a corporate car pooling app, is using a combination of Bollywood themes and technology to engage its customers. It recently revamped its ride booking chat bot on Facebook Messenger using themes from Bollywood blockbuster Sholay to surprise users coming to the platform. The Orahi bot is currently in beta stage.

“We realised bots are getting kind of mundane unless you have a Siri kind-of-a bot, which is an open bot and replies to almost everything. So, we are focusing on making the bot more exciting for the user and surprise them every day,” said Sameer Khanna, founder and CEO, Orahi.com. “We plan to make it more engaging by including Bhojpuri accent or incorporating other Bollywood themes.”

In the next 6-8 months, it hopes to register 8 lakh people in Delhi/NCR for daily rides.

Orahi is not alone in this space. Meru Cabs and auto aggregator Jugnoo have already launched their chat bots on Facebook and are seeing good traction. Jugnoo enabled auto rickshaw booking on Facebook in May this year. It plans to extend it to other services such as Jugnoo Meals and Jugnoo Fresh. Around 4-5% of all transactions are currently coming through its chat bots, of which one in three are about booking queries. It claims that one in five transactions get completed.

“When we were building this we thought people would instantaneously move on to chat bots,” said Saurabh Wadhawan, product head, Jugnoo. “But the market is very premature, both from the user’s perspective as well as the company’s. It is still in the developmental phase. We don’t know how the end product will turn up.”

Meru Cabs has also integrated its cab booking system with

Facebook Messenger. At Meru Cabs, a large chunk of the customers use the chat bot for booking, while the rest typically go to the chat bot for finding rates, canceling booking, giving feedback and so on.

“The self-learning capabilities has made conversation with bots easier. Also, the rising app fatigue among users is leading to an uptake in chat bot service,” said Nilesh Sangoi, CEO, Meru Cabs.

Chat bots are an evolution over apps as they provide conversational experience which users were missing in the app or web usage. Second, there is limit to how many apps people can download. Chat bots also help save a lot of bandwidth on mobile, making them increasingly popular with customers as well as consumer internet companies.

Currently, companies are focusing on building products and making customer experience seemless through chat bots. “Both mobile app and chat bot will co-exist. Two years back companies were talking about getting app-only but retracted from it. There are all kinds of users in the market and companies must cater to them all,” said Wadhwan.

Jugnoo is currently present in 40 cities and claims to be facilitating 30,000-35,000 rides on a daily basis.

Unlike a mobile app, chat bot can be used for unlimited number of services such as weather update, cab booking, etc. “As machine learning and artificial intelligence ability of systems are improving, so is a bot’s accuracy,” said Sangoi.

Currently, the percentage of traffic coming through the Facebook Messenger chat bot is small but Meru Cabs expects good numbers going forward.

“WeChat is the poster boy in this space. A lot of commerce happens through bot on its platform. Facebook and Skype and platforms like WhatsApp are fast catching up. In the recent update, WhatsApp has also changed its privacy policy to allow businesses to message its users,” said Sangoi.

Even as companies roll out a mobile application for almost everything, bots are becoming a smaller, faster and smarter alternative to apps. While brands are seeing it as one more channel of interaction in addition to website and app, for consumers it is seen as an alternative to easy access to product or service with a conversational interface. However, there is a long way to go before brands successfully capitalise on these digital assistants.

“Chat bots are still not mature enough to handle all user requirements. The UI/UX (user interface/user experience) options in a bot are also limited where the

entire functionality of the application cannot be created in the bot as of today. But this field is all set to improve. Within a few years, you can expect a strong inclination towards pushing different businesses on the same bot. For now, apps and bots will co-exist,” said Khanna.