John Lugtu | Contributor
Featured image: Zalmy Karimi is a fourth-year business student, CEO of ZKDEV and creator of Set.o. | Amir Yazdanparast
If you’ve noticed that you don’t really use the majority of the apps on your devices anymore, you’re not alone. People are using apps less frequently, and the majority of the ones still being used are predominantly social media related.
For users, this simply means extra storage space. For app developers, it’s becoming a landscape of cutthroat competition in an already-saturated field.
Zalmy Karimi, a fourth-year business administration student and CEO of ZKDEV, saw this as an opportunity. Armed with the business knowledge he received at York and his autodidactic coding skills, Karimi found the emerging popularity of chatbots as a potential successor to the throne once ruled by mobile apps.
Chatbots are interactive computer programs that can execute actions based on human-like conversations, usually in instant-messaging format.
Chatbots have been around for quite some time in the tech world, but they did not gain prominence until the rollout of improved artificial intelligence.
The chatbot that Karimi has developed is called Set.o.
“Set.o is a music-recognition chatbot within Facebook Messenger. Send Set.o a six to eight second recording of any music around you and the bot will instantly recognize the song,” he says.
“Set.o connects the user’s recordings to a database of 40 million music fingerprints to identify a song all without having to navigate out of [Facebook] Messenger. That means there’s no need for another app to take up space in your phone at all,” adds Karimi.
When asked what makes his chatbot unique in its own right, Karimi highlights the simplicity and functionality of Set.o.
The bot represents the growing trend of businesses and tech companies migrating from apps to interactive chatbots. As people use fewer apps, known as “app fatigue,” various companies are implementing chatbots on platforms like Facebook Messenger as a new means to reach out to potential and current customers.
You may have already interacted with one, as plenty of companies use chatbots to process some customer service interactions.
“I believe that [chatbots] can be merged together into a simple, conversational interface. I hope to build different chatbots that are valuable additions to a conversation interface rather than just individual apps,” says Karimi.
For those interested in emulating his early success in the tech industry, Karimi has some advice: “Know your audience. The days of ‘build it and they will come’ are long over. We are now in the days of, ‘research it, determine a target market, build it, test it and then market it’ to gain some traction.”
so basically it’s a chatbot of Shazaam. i guess that might be compelling.