A few days ago Freshworks announced the acquisition of startup Joe Hukum, making it its eighth acquisition. Joe Hukum builds a chatbot platform that enables companies to quickly build their own chatbots for sales-, service-, or marketing purposes. In contrast to the technologies built by Frilp (acquired October, 2015) and Chatimity (acquired October, 2016) that rely on NLP (Natural Language Processing, as opposed to Neuro-Linguistic Programming) technologies, these bots are built using a Decision Tree technology. In order to be able to provide more advanced speech recognition they can connect to services of the Stanford Natural Language Processing Group, wit.ai, or api.ai. The created bots can be connected to websites, apps, or Facebook.
The press release got published on July 20, 2017, but you can read it right here, before moving on to My Take.
Freshworks acquires chatbot platform startup, Joe Hukum
Company enhances capabilities to assist organizations assemble and deploy bots
San Bruno, July 2017 —Freshworks, the leading provider of cloud-based business software, today announced the acquisition of Joe Hukum, a platform that enables businesses to build their own chatbots based on logical workflows. This acquisition marks Freshworks’ eighth in just under two years, as it further bolsters capabilities to strengthen its business software suite. Freshworks had earlier acquired Chatimity and Frilp, key acquisitions that are enhancing neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) based Artificial Intelligence capabilities, while Joe Hukum’s decision tree based frameworks complete key capabilities to launch chatbot-powered solutions.
Joe Hukum end up primarily based in July 2015 with the useful resource of Arihant Jain, Ajeet Kushwaha, and Rahul Agarwal, who have been the founding crew in the back of two of India?S most super healthcare startups, HealthKart and 1mg. Joe Hukum?S technology is powered thru a robust selection tree framework that automates income, provider, and assist workflows, across various channels and person interfaces. The Joe Hukum team will be responsible for building bots on top of gift Freshworks products, permitting workflow automations for demand technology, information manipulate, and dynamic in-app self service.
?We are seeing robust interest from our customers on how they need to leverage chatbots as they're searching out new approaches to have interaction with clients on their net and mobile channels,? Said Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and CEO of Freshworks. ?As purchaser alternatives shift from traditional cellular phone tree based name middle assist, chatbots provide a modern guide enjoy, at the identical time as basically solving the age antique assignment of triaging client inquiries and routing that to the right guide agent. These are still early days for chatbots, but Joe Hukum?S contemporary crew and generation will help our clients higher engage and aid their customers.?
Consumers today spend the most amount in their time messaging, even more than what they do on social media. According to a Gartner document, via 2019, forty% of corporations might be actively the use of chatbots to facilitate company strategies the usage of herbal-language interactions.
?Consumer behaviour is substantially changing, perhaps quicker than generation can maintain up. Having helped construct a a hit e-commerce corporation in India, I found out customers are constantly seeking out much less tough procedures to interact with agencies and chatbots furnished a easy, but powerful manner to cope with this want,? Said Arihant Jain, Co-founder of Joe Hukum. ?As a founder, I could not have asked for a better very last outcomes for Joe Hukum. Being part of Freshworks is fantastic thrilling for everybody because it offers us a platform that provides us scale and attain and effect hundreds of masses of clients.
Recently dubbed one of Forbes’ next billion-dollar startups, Freshworks has experienced an incredible year of growth. Each acquisition it makes not only brings new capabilities to the Freshworks suite of products but also brings intelligent and creative talent to the ever growing team.
To learn more about Freshworks, please visit http://www.freshworks.com.
About Freshworks
Freshworks Inc. is the parent company behind the suite of products which includes Freshdesk, Freshservice, Freshsales and Freshcaller. The company’s suite of products is designed to work tightly together to increase collaboration and help teams better connect and communicate with their customers and co-workers. Founded in October 2010, Freshworks Inc. is backed by Accel, Tiger Global Management, CapitalG, and Sequoia Capital India. Freshworks has its HQ in San Bruno, California and global offices in India, UK, Australia, and Germany. The company's cloud-based suite of SaaS products is widely used by over 100,000 customers around the world including Honda, Bridgestone, Hugo Boss, University of Pennsylvania, Toshiba and Cisco.
My Take
Bots are here to stay (and improve).
This acquisition is in my eyes an interesting move that focuses on the near term gain that bots can provide through automation of narrowly focusing on specific topics.
The decision tree technology that Joe Hukum provides gives exactly that. The customer provides a workflow chart or decision matrix, which then gets converted into a bot. This makes for easy configuration and likely also configurability. Decision tree technology is also more mature than other, AI based, technologies, but it takes a lot of the machine learning out of the picture. This is not necessarily a bad thing for adoption, but also have a look at the concerns below.
Acquiring Joe Hukum describes a natural evolution after having acquired chat- and collaboration platforms and technologies in the past. Now Freshworks has gained the ability to improve process automation on their backs – along with another chat platform to consolidate.
However, it ties neatly into Freshdesk as well as Freshsales, more importantly also on the channels that humans use. I do see some immediate use cases in lead capturing to conversion processes due to engaging into conversations and in the support area by using bots as the first level of engagement by making them the front end to FAQs.
On the concerns side this acquisition is focusing rather on automation and optimization than on customer experience since, judging by the presented flows, there is an IVR-like guidance of the customer, instead of following the user’s flow. On the other hand even companies focusing on speech recognition for long times like Nuance Technology have a hard time with intent detection and the proper reaction to this intent. But then Nuance is focusing on (dynamic) decision trees, too.
Another concern could be the reliance on third party speech recognition that Joe Hukum has. While this is inevitable when starting a solution fast speech recognition, and increasingly –generation, will become a core technology that will permeate business- and other applications in a world that moves to ambient computing. But here the technologies acquired earlier should be of help in this area.
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