Everise, a Singaporean company for business processing outsourcing, announced today it has taken a majority stake in Hyperlab, a Malaysian startup that has built a chatbot tool to help companies automate their customer care.
Hyperlab says its unique selling point is the ability to recognise specific Southeast Asian dialects — such as Singlish — and provide the same level of service. It has services in English, Bahasa Malaysia, Manglish (Malaysian Slang), Singlish and Chinese.
This is important because one of the factors holding chatbots back is the limited phrases they can understand or an inability to distinguish between dictionary-language and how people actually speak. Hyperlab claims their chatbots have spoken with over 1 million users.
“Hyperlab will provide a significant boost in capabilities to both Everise and our clients allowing us to interact with customers online in multiple Southeast Asian dialects, handle more interactions more efficiently, automate more tasks, reduce costs and generate actionable data and analytics,” said Sudhir Agarwal, the CEO of Everise, in a statement.
Hyperlab will fall under the Everise umbrella of companies and operate as a subsidiary based in Malaysia.
For Everise, the acquisition makes sense as a customer services company because it is working to disrupt the call center business model. Recently Everise worked with Microsoft to help two firms build a platform to automate voice, video and text interactions.
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/singapore-customer-company-acquires-malaysian-chatbot-startup-hyperlab-040350315.html