What is BSE's AI-powered Ask Motabhai chatbot all about?

For stock market investors, trawling through the vast amount of data about a company before deciding to put money into it can be a long and arduous process. But now, help is just a chatbot away.

BSE Ltd, operator of Asia's oldest stock exchange, on Wednesday formally launched an artificial intelligence-based chatbot called ‘Ask Motabhai’ to help investors find stock-related information on its website.

The BSE website offers information on stock price, corporate results and announcements of more than 5,000 companies listed on its platform.

The chatbot, developed in partnership with Microsoft Corp and ShepHertz Technologies, is designed to provide on-demand data and information from the BSE website. The chatbot can have a text-based conversation with a user and can provide customised information. 

Apart from stock prices and corporate announcements, the chatbot will also provide information on mutual funds, derivatives and initial public offerings. 
For instance, it is programmed to address queries such as what new IPOs will hit the market or which stocks are trading at their 52-week high.

The chatbot has been built using the Microsoft Bot Framework, Cognitive Services, QnA Maker and Language Understanding Intelligent Service on Microsoft Azure cloud.

Microsoft’s partner ShepHertz delivered the chatbot along with an intuitive management console, and dashboards to get analytics on the chatbot usage patterns, resolved or unresolved queries and management of internal information systems.

ShepHertz is a company that develops applications on the cloud. Founded in 2010, the platform offers pre-built APIs, Actionable BigData, and AI.

The BSE joins a growing number of companies across segments in using chatbots to provide information to users. In February, a Gartner report indicated that nearly a quarter of customer support operations will integrate virtual assistants, such as chatbots, by 2020. 

In the financial services sector, Ratan Tata-backed artificial intelligence firm Niki.ai tied up with Kerala-headquartered Federal Bank in January to launch a virtual assistant on the private-sector lender’s smartphone application, FedMobile.