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| Source: Microsoft. Built upon Microsoft's Azure cloud platform and LUIS, HHWT’s chatbot Sofia can automatically provide quick answers to questions posed by
users. |
Have Halal, Will Travel (HHWT) was started because founder Mikhail Goh had trouble finding halal food in South Korea five years ago.
“If there were websites out there that discussed halal food
in South Korea, they were either hard to find, or any information that I
came across wasn’t of much help,” recalled Goh, who is now based in
Singapore. “Many times, you have to make decisions based on limited
information as a Muslim traveller.
“Do I take the trip down? It’s a 40 to 45-minute ride, based
on a single grainy picture, and with very little information to rely
on.”
The content platform helps Muslims travel with confidence
in countries where locating halal food can be a challenge. HHWT currently hosts hundreds of articles
and guides online, and also has a mobile app and social media
channels. It now reaches over 9 million Muslims from Singapore,
Malaysia and Indonesia each month.
As readership and site traffic on HHWT continued to
grow, it became clear that the platform needed to grow its backend
infrastructure in tandem. Fielding 8,000 users looking for halal food options in Tokyo over
platforms like Facebook, e-mail or website comments would be best served by a chatbot, the company behind HHWT decided.
Combining
Microsoft’s Azure cloud and its Language Understanding Intelligence Services (LUIS),
HHWT’s chatbot now answers most of the questions that travellers ask through the platform every day. Called Sofia - chosen after users voted for the name in a
public poll - the chatbot is online 24x7, allowing the
HHWT team to significantly increase their
engagement level with users daily.
“We created Sofia simply because people have been asking us
questions which we found could be answered largely through automation,”
said Goh.
At the same time, through the responses and feedback received from
users interacting with Sofia,
HHWT can now analyse and contextualise all
that input to help provide more personalised content for each
individual user, thus serving customers’ needs better.
Sofia was set up in a surprisingly
short amount of time. Instead of creating a chatbot from scratch, the
HHWT team relied on existing tools that Microsoft provides on the cloud
to create Sofia, with the help of technology partner PleoData.
The Azure cloud platform comes with an application programming interface (API) for a QnA Maker. The feature creates a FAQ from existing content. This was the first building block the team tapped on to form answers to
commonly-asked questions. Microsoft’s LUIS, a machine learning-based service to build natural language into apps, bots, and devices then enabled chatbot designers to draw on datasets already in existence. This allowed the team to match users' questions, which can come in many forms, with the right answers.
“I think one of the really big benefits of Microsoft Azure
is the QnA Maker,” said Rachel Tan, MD, PleoData. “It
allows any company to be able to release a working chatbot in less than seven working days, which is quite an amazing feat.”
It helped that HHWT already had an existing FAQ, which was input into the
QnA maker. Though that was sufficient to launch a chatbot as-is, the
team went one step further to customise the chatbot so that it could
offer more intelligent content to users.
Currently, Sofia uses what is known as a decision tree that lets
users narrow down the answers they are looking for. In future, this
process will be simpler and more intuitive—the system will automatically
answer questions with a deeper understanding, without having to seek
clarification.
This next step for
HHWT involves sinking its teeth more deeply into
machine learning. With larger datasets to draw on after running the
chatbot over time,
HHWT would be able to develop contextual and
personalised content.
Today, HHWT works with tourism boards from countries around
the world and global brands to reach out to the Muslim community. As the
same time, they are also working with partners to provide
functionalities such as the ability to complete travel bookings and
payment transactions on the website. With the scalability of Azure cloud, as well as LUIS, powering the
Sofia chatbot, HHWT is now looking towards expansion to more countries
within Southeast Asia and beyond.
Goh reinforced that their focus
over the next two years is to build on their understanding of their
consumers' needs and wants. “One of the things we are seeking to improve
for our chatbot is its search and response – to give us a better
understanding of what people are searching for, and from there, better
responses and better content,” he said.
“As a Muslim myself, I feel that Muslims shouldn’t be restricted to just kebabs or nasi biryani,” Goh noted. “To really understand different cultures, you have to eat their food,
speak their language, and really get lost in their country. Muslims
shouldn’t be deprived from that opportunity.”
Explore:
Watch the
video introducing Sofia the chatbot
Download the Microsoft Business Owners’ Guide to Technology
Hashtag: #HHWT
