The Rise of the Chatbot Startup

The most common chatbots you’ll find online serve as customer support agents, marketing channels or entertainment applications. But as chatbots become more popular and refined, many businesses are focusing solely on chatbots to provide a core experience. What we’re seeing now is a chatbot startup shift where chatbots as businesses offer unique experiences to users in messaging apps.

In a nutshell, a chatbot application makes good use of its conversational UI to let users accomplish tasks they never could be for, all on their own. Some of these applications help users negotiate deals or reach difficult goals with ease. Let’s delve into some great chatbot startup examples to see where the industry’s moving today.

The Chatbot Lawyer

One chatbot application making the rounds in the press is DoNotPay. This free chatbot application helps users contest their parking tickets—and so far, it’s appealed over $4 million. Created by 19-year-old Joshua Browder, a British Stanford University student, the bot works like a lawyer. It asks some simple questions to determine your appeal’s viability. From there, it helps you find and fill all the forms you need to make a successful case. In dealing with parking tickets, the chatbot application gained a 64% success rate on appeals.

But that’s not all. Browder, who dreams of his bot someday replacing lawyers, opened DoNotPay to thousands of legal cases. Most recently, it’s made waves for making it easy for users to sue Equifax in response to its data breach scandal. Whatever legal counsel you need, just type it in the bot’s search.

A chatbot startup like DoNotPay is notable because it empowers users to navigate a confusing legal process with ease, letting them act on knowledge and expertise that would otherwise be locked away. While websites, books and blogs could try to achieve the same goal, the conversational format of a chatbot provides a unique experience to help users accomplish tasks in a natural and intuitive way.

Strike a Deal with Conversational UI

A good chatbot startup should also help users be their best selves, letting them make use of all the data the generate in their day-to-day. Trim, for example, is a chatbot business focused on helping users save money by tracking their spending and discovering opportunities to save. It works a bit like a personal financial advisor. Helping you find cashback deals, cancel unneeded subscriptions and even renegotiate your cable bill.

It’s worth noting that this sort of application isn’t exactly new. Financial services that track spending to save money are a dime a dozen. But its unique conversational UI allows it to take things one step further: Trim’s most notable feature is its ability to negotiate with Comcast to reduce your cable and internet bill. An application that can’t talk, then, could never provide such a service. We’d love to see Trim negotiate with other services, too. Plus, we’d love to see more chatbot business examples that serve as representatives for users.

Another feature of Trim is its security. One point of contention between a chatbot business and users is the issue of personal data security. Trim uses “bank-level security” to ensure their users can have a great experience while keeping their finances safe. This makes a good example for how chatbots as business can encrypt user data for a better experience.

The Wackier Chatbot Startup: Achieving Immortality

Replacing lawyers and financial advisors is good and all. However, how can a chatbot startup provide an incredibly new experience? One chatbot application that’ll make your heard spin is what philosophers have sought throughout history: immortality.

Eternime is a chatbot business that aims to archive everyday people’s lives, memories and experiences into their own AI. Users answer questions about their lives, which helps Eternime build a digital avatar to serve in their stead long after they’ve passed on to the afterlife. The chatbot startup compares itself to a “library that has people instead of books”. It hopes that users can learn from deceased loved ones and strangers alike, interviewing their immortal avatars about their life experiences.

One might think that we provide this sort of data on social media already, and that’s true. One can imagine how useful a Twitter archive, for example, will be for sociologists hundreds of years from now who want to learn more about our era. But the personal digital doppelganger afforded by a chatbot AI provides an exciting, novel way for people to naturally interact with archives of information. What if chatbots as businesses offered more possibilities for digital avatars? What if they reinvent the way we use social media or find jobs?

With a growing chatbot-first focus, things are looking exciting for chatbots and artificial intelligence development. Far from answering frequently asked questions or serving as customer support agents, chatbots are offering incredible use cases that can change the way we interact with one another. What chatbot business has excited you recently? Let us know!

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