YUNKO — A Chatbot. About Yunko and Chatbots
By: Rishabh Khandelwal
Tags: Startup, Chatbots

About Yunko and Chatbots

Yunko is a chatbot is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system used to conduct an online chat conversation via text or text-to-speech to customers automatically based on set of predefined conditions, instead of providing direct conversation with a live human. Chatbot is a bot designed to convincingly simulate the way a human would behave while holding a conversation and respond to the questions and needs of the human on the other end. Chatbots are used in dialog systems, for various purposes including customer service, information gathering, or for application request routing.

Market Demand

Chatbots provides great help to the marketing team for improving the brand value or increasing the sales which increase the scope of the company’s welfare. Here are some of the advantages of using a chatbot:

They can be proactive or reactive. Their responses are consistent every time. They can respond to customers immediately. They can help you collect important data and also learn from the collected data. They can be used through a variety of different mediums like SMS, live chats, or even social media like Facebook and discord. They can completely change the digital market game.

The chatbot market was valued at USD 17.17 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach USD 102.29 billion by 2025, registering a CAGR of 34.75% over the forecast period, 2020–2025.

Relevant Products in the market

There are many other companies in the market targeting chatbots as it has a very large market. But, what is unique with Yunko is:

We provide free chatbots with predefined templates which can be used by small start-ups or new companies having low budgets. Even These can be set up by the companies in about 15 – 30 minutes and the bot will be good to go. And the best part is that even people not from coding background can set up the bot. We also plan on expanding our chatbots to discord, a mobile app, as well as keep a personal interactive page on our website where people can go and have a conversation with the bot. In the personal section of the bot, while holding a conversation, our bot, by the use of Artificial Intelligence(AI), can detect if the personal is facing any problem for example insecurity or depression and it will console him and respond accordingly. It will ask the person if its an emergency or not, and if it is an emergency then it will be sending the details of the person through GPS to the nearest police station. And if it not an emergency then it will provide the person with the contact information of the respective organizations.

Target Customers

Chatbots is mainly used by companies for customer service while replacing humans with bots which can handle many queries of the customer via text or text-to-speech conversations increasing the efficiency of the company.

But, our chatbots will be diverse as we want our customer range to increase. So, we will be making chatbots for discord as well as we will be having a chatbot on our website so that anyone can hold a conversation with a bot.

Required knowledge or expertise

Here is what I will be using to make the chatbot:

HTML (For basic webpage structure) CSS (To make the website interactive) JavaScript (Alternative to HTML and CSS) Python (For Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Development) Swift (iOS app development) Android Studio (Android app development) Amazon AWS (For Cloud Computing Services) Google Maps (For location)

My solution

Here is a basic idea of how my chatbot would work.

When the user writes a sentence and sends it to the chatbot, it follows 3 basic steps:

First step (of sentence segmentation) is of dividing the written text into meaningful units. These units are the input of the second step (called as word tokenization) where they are divided into smaller parts called “tokens”. These tokens are very useful for finding such patterns as well as is considered as a base step for stemming and lemmatization. In the third step, text lemmatization refers to a lexical treatment applied to a text in order to analyze it. After that, the model will predict the tag of the sentence so it can choose the adequate response.

The Natural Language Processing pipeline we are following to create this chatbot is shown below:

FLOWCHART FOR EASY UNDERSTANDING

Estimated budget

There is a lot of work required to develop a chatbot. Seeing the work that goes into developing a chatbot , the approximate cost of developing a chatbot will be in the range of $50,000 to $60,000 on developing it alone. If I hire a team, then the budget will be increased exponentially but the time taken to complete the product will be decreased as well. The cost range includes the design, development, integration part, and the website of the starting Yunko.

Product Pricing

The chatbot will be divided into 4 main sections :

A free template will be available for everyone to use and this will be beneficial for small companies and start-ups. There will be a premium version especially designed for the specific company according to their needs. And it’s price will vary from $1000 to $10,000 per year depending on the requirements and needs set by the company. This will mainly be beneficial for the larger companies who need additional features for their company. On the website there will be a chatbot for anyone to go and have a conversation with a bot which will be totally free of cost. There will also be a chatbot on social media such as discord by the name of Yunko available for everyone to enjoy and chat with the bot.

Marketing Plan

There are two main strategies that I will use for marketing my product:

Firstly, I will implement the chatbot on discord in some major servers at a very low price by partnering with the server. That will itself result in several thousands of people using the bot on discord. Secondly, 5 to 10 seconds of YouTube ad will be enough to widespread the start-up as mostly everyone uses YouTube.

Risk Analysis

Being a startup, risks are always there. There are many places where things can go wrong. Here are some of the major risks that we might face:

Market Risk: There is a high chance that the product won’t be able to gain enough popularity and will remain under the rock for a long time. Also, people do not always want to change things even though there is a better product in the market. So, this will be a major obstacle we will need to overcome. Bugs: In Artificial Intelligence(AI) based startup, there is a high chance that the chatbot will have lots of bugs. This is quite common for a tech-based startup. This will be one of the challenges we will face while developing the chatbot.

Milestone and Timeline

Integration with an app : This will take 40–60 hours of working. Development of communication interface:

Command language user interpreter will take around 40–60 hours of work.

Natural language user interface will take somewhere around 120–160 hours.

Business logic:

Adaptation of an existing business logic, will take 120–160 hours.

Development of business logic from scratch will take around 160–200 hours.

Then, there will be many stages of testing the product which will again take around 60–100 hours. Then, depending on the problems, more changes will be made which can take up to 100 hours of work. And then the bot will again be sent for testing. This process will continue until the product is perfect and ready to launch.