Chatbot Company in Indonesia

It turns out that there is a lot of room for chatbots in Indonesia. There is a huge population of people who are not tech savvy and for whom English is either not their first language, or it they don't speak it at all. Chatbot Indonesia offer an easy way to communicate with these populations.

"There are thousands of people who do not have internet access but can still use chatbots, a lot of people are looking for other methods to communicate with the tech savvy," Nada Murningsih, a program coordinator at Kompas Gramedia.com, said in an interview with TechCrunch.

For example in Indonesia there are thousands of households without any internet access and they still use chatbots to communicate. There is also a huge number of smartphone users, well over 85% per IHS Markit.org. With this number of people, it's not hard to imagine the large potential for chatbots in Indonesia.

"The potential is big, there are a lot of people who don't know English, doesn't need to be a tech savvy person and yet can use the chatbot," Murningsih said.

In Indonesia there are a few companies who are already using chatbots to communicate: LINE Corp and Paltalk Inc. They have their own apps which host their chatbots. But the problem is that LINE Corp does not have a chatbot language, Paltalk Inc. does, but they don't host their chatbot on their platform.

Therefore, these companies look to find another company like Kik Messenger or Facebook to handle their chatbots.

In Indonesia there are several chatbot software vendors and one of them is ChatCloud Inc., ChatCloud has developed a chatting bot called Eliza for Facebook Messenger, and it now supports the English language.

"It's a pretty simple and intuitive chatbot, it can do all the things you need from an AI chatbot," ChatCloud CEO Oussama Khatib told TechCrunch.

ChatCloud is the company that has developed the Eliza chatbot for Facebook messenger in Indonesia and they recently conducted a survey to find out if they should expand their service to include other languages.

I asked Oussama Khatib what it's like to have a chatbot language for Indonesia and he told me, "It's pretty easy to develop a chatbot in English now, with the Facebook Messenger SDK, it's much easier. Basically you just need to copy the code from the English one and you'll be able to do everything."

"In Indonesia there are many people who can't understand English, therefore a chatbot language that is easy to understand is very important," Khatib said.

Aside from it being easy to develop, Facebook Messenger is also a great platform for chatbots because of all its people: "The biggest messenger in Indonesia is LINE and it doesn't have any chatbot languages. And Paltalk Inc. who has their own chatbot does not host it on their platform," Khatib said.

"So to have a chatbot language in Indonesia is very important and there are a lot of opportunities," he added.

ChatCloud has selected Nusantara Fintech & Digital Finance as their chatbot agent in Indonesia, therefore the company will be handling all the business in Indonesia and they can help ChatCloud translate the source code into Bahasa Indonesia.

"At the moment we're in advanced talks and there's a lot of potential for an chatbot language in Indonesia, it would be better if we can work with a company that can help us do it, but we're open to the idea," he said.

ChatCloud is also working on an Indonesian version of their own chatbot and they're going to do a lot of marketing to get people interested. But the most important thing is the fact that ChatCloud is a global company.

"We want to build an Indonesian chatbot that supports Bahasa Indonesia," Khatib said.

Facebook Messenger has a lot of potential in Indonesia, it's simple and easy to use for both the tech-savvy and non-tech-savvy. If people want to communicate then they can just open Facebook Messenger on their phone, send a message and there's instant communication.

"The potential in Indonesia is huge," Khatib said.