Founded in 2015, Gurugram based startup Bobble AI is making mobile communications more personalized and expressive. Analytics India Magazine caught up with Ankit Prasad, Founder and CEO of Bobble AI to gain insights on how the startup is striving to provide personalisation. Bobble is backed by SAIF Partners venture capital firm and another strategic investor. Since 2015, the launch of Bobble Content made it entertaining for people to create their virtual avatars wherein clicking a single selfie produces multiple kinds of conversational content. In addition to this, Bobble keyboard is launched in 2016 which is currently comprised of 22 Indian languages and 6 dialects. The products are typically released on a fortnightly basis.

AIML@Bobble

The core engine that fuels the Android/iOS frontend is primarily based on AI. The company also has an in-house R&D team for technology like NLP in 22 Indian languages, computer graphics for facial feature detection and modulation. 

“We have always been early adopters of relevant new tech opportunities that come our way. Be it Facebook’s open graph API, Whatsapp stickers API, Android/iOS keyboard API, etc.”-Prasad

One of the most recent products, the Shopping Camera, especially focuses on the female demographic, the company has effectively introduced their services along with adding value with the latest technology like AI, NLP, etc. 

Prasad added, “We have built our own engine for content recommendation, word suggestion, auto-correction, swipe typing, speech to text conversion, etc. While others like SwiftKey focus on just word prediction, our product allows the prediction of entire responses, like what Gmail or LinkedIn does, we call it Bobble Smart Replies.”

Creative Team For GIFs

For GIFs, the company has 3 separate teams in place:

•  Machine Learning based tagging/understanding of video clips from trending videos that are picked up by our automated bots
•  A team of in-house content managers that create fresh GIFs
• A community of 200+ designers that we work with

Focused Consumers

Majority of the consumers mainly focused are the millennials from Tier 2 and 3 cities, either school or college goers, or new entrants to the workforce.

Hiring Phase 

The company believes in “quality over quantity when it comes to our workforce” and currently comprises of 50 people. The company mainly reach out to specific people who have made significant contributions to similar products as the company. Every year, about 30-40 interns are chosen from Tier 1 colleges from which the best 5-6 interns get the chance to join the team in full time.

Potential Competitors

Prasad stated, “For our primary product, the keyboard, our competitors are mainly Google’s Gboard and Microsoft’s Swiftkey. Their market shares are definitely better, simply because they’ve been in this space for a lot longer than us and have better leverage over OEMs, not to forget deeper pockets! Our market shares are radically increasing, based purely on our merit as the highest rated keyboard globally on Play Store.” 

He added, “In content, we compete with Samsung’s Emotify, Snapchat’s Bitmoji and Tenor GIFs. Here too we have proved our mettle by creating more advanced customization features than the others. Our other products are fairly new, we have the first mover advantage, and we are only waiting for large tech companies to copy and catch up!”

Roadmap Ahead

In the coming years, the company is planning to launch more products and services around input methods, some of which are already in the beta stage.