Ankit Prasad – Founder and CEO, Bobble AI

Bobble AI with its customized and personalized keyboard and content has conquered more than 25 million users across the globe. With partners such as Whatsapp and Tinder it is aspiring even higher. Ankit Prasad, Founder and CEO of Bobble AI shared his insights with My Mobile.

What is Bobble AI? Tell us about the company’s transformation from its first year till now? Bobble AI offers numerous products, with the flagship and the most popular product being the Bobble Keyboard; the highest rated and the most retained keyboard in India. The keyboard exists to make conversations even more exciting, expressive and personalized than before. The company aims to provide a smarter phone experience for the Next Billion Indians with Artificial Intelligence around input methods.

Since 2015, Bobble Content has been making people’s lives and conversations entertaining, by creating their unique Bobblehead based customizable Stickers and GIFS. A single selfie is capable of producing multiple kinds of conversational content. We gained immense virality and popularity, and within the first 3 months of launch, we had already crossed 1 Million users. Today, the number of Bobble content

users has crossed more than 25M.

We realized we needed to have seamless integration with social apps. Trying to achieve this through third parties was too much of a hassle, and we decided to deal with it on our own and have a solution which is handy and universal for our users. We created our own keyboard, and now possess a better understanding of the consumers’ content needs. For real-time content generation and distribution, the keyboard worked like a charm.

No other company in the space had tried enough to understand the challenges involved in the local/regional space in the country. The digital world is dominated by the English language, while India needs its own place within this ecosystem. We launched the keyboard in 2016, and it became our mission to solve the problem of the language barrier for people getting exposed to the internet for the first time via smartphones. Our product is

aimed not just at elite India, but at the Next Billion Indians, notably for people being introduced to smartphones. Our engagement with our consumers today is something we’re very proud of.

In 2017, we started to build our expertise on the languages, with a strong hold on vernacular content, language features, voice, camera, etc. In 2018 we began to extend our expertise to help other businesses in India connect with customers at a deeper level. Since 2019, we are working on nurturing and strengthening our business relations. One of our goals is to co-create products and services with other brands and to extend our unique technologies in a packaged manner. We help FMCG brands become a conversational topic on Whatsapp conversations with users’ personalised branded content.

With our prowess in regional languages, we also have an Intent Prediction technology in place for all

22 languages. This ensured a smooth transition to an AI company.

We have worked with partners like Tinder, Zomato, Sony Entertainment, Viacom18, Reebok, etc. in placing their brands over relevant Bobble content. We have also worked with the likes of Amazon, Xiaomi, Housing, etc. in varying capacities for extending our unique technologies. We also partner with OEMS for a smarter experience and higher engagement with our AI around input methods like keyboard, camera, and other expression features at OS level.

On what kind of consumers are the products focused on? Our products are focused on the Next Billion Indians, with a focus on millennials, especially from Tier 2 and 3 cities. We help our users engage in and uplift conversations, becoming a part of friends and family on Whatsapp groups.

One of our most recent products, the Shopping Camera, especially focuses on the female demographic; women who are interested in fashion and styling and also looking out at tools to help them shop effectively. We are always trying to figure out gaps in input methods, areas where we could effectively introduce our services and add value with our latest technology in Artificial Intelligence, NLP, etc.

We are particularly interested in consumer segments that have been previously neglected by other companies. A recent product of ours - Smart Driving Assistant, focusses on cab drivers, a section that is rapidly growing in number owing to the numerous cab-hailing services in play, and yet, a section not paid any attention to.

“We are also looking at the UAE, where 50 per cent of the population is the Indian diaspora. Going forward, we want to grow profitably and sustainably, working collectively with other players in the ecosystem”

Who are your potential competitors in India? What makes you better than them? 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 a better leverage over OEMS, not to forget deeper pockets. Our market shares are radically increasing based purely on our merit as the highestrated and most engaged keyboard globally on Play Store.

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 personalisation and customization features than the others. Our other products are fairly new, we have the firstmover advantage, and we are only waiting for large tech companies to copy and catch up. What does the future roadmap look like? Apart from India, Bobble has tested its products in Indonesia, and is planning to expand to Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and other regions in Southeast Asia.

We are also looking at the UAE, where 50 per cent of the population is the Indian diaspora. Going forward, we want to grow profitably and sustainably, working collectively with other players in the ecosystem. We wouldn’t mind raising one or two more rounds of funds, although we are sufficiently funded as of now. Next, we plan on launching more products and services around input methods, some of which are already in the beta stage. Input methods help us understand users better, and contribute more significantly in their life.

We see ourselves as a pure tech company, emerging out of India and going global, competing for neck-to-neck with giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung among others.

Can you give us an overview of the company’s core tech stack? We take the utmost pride in the fact that every piece of technology that we use has been built in-house by our team. 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. When it comes to our servers, they are ready for sudden traffic jump which we face during the festive seasons because of horizontally scalable and highly reliable micro service architecture.

Our core engine that fuels the Android/ios frontend is primarily based on Artificial Intelligence. We also have an in-house R&D team for technology like NLP in 22 Indian languages, computer graphics for facial feature detection and modulation.

What is the size of the engineering team? We have approximately 50 people in the team as of now.

How often are the updates released? Typically, we release updates on a fortnightly basis.

Any plans for the tie-up with leading mobile brands? In the past Bobble Keyboard has entered into partnership with Gionee India. We have also partnered with Indus, Panasonic, Infocus, among others. The Keyboard application can be used with all kinds of messaging and social media platforms like Facebook, Whatsapp, etc. ■