The hype around ChatGPT, OpenAI’s viral AI-powered chatbot, hasn’t reached a peak yet. That’s the vibe one gets from Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 batch, which features no fewer than four startups that claim to be building a “ChatGPT for X.”
That new ventures are jumping on the ChatGPT hype train isn’t surprising, considering ChatGPT’s virality. By one metric, ChatGPT is the fastest-growing app in the world, having reached 100 million users within the first two months of launch. Associating with an app that visible, particularly one that’s in the red-hot generative AI space, is bound to get attention — a fact to which this article is a testament.
The first ChatGPT-inflected startup that caught our eye was Yuma, whose customer demographic is primarily — but not exclusively — Shopify merchants. Yuma’s platform provides ChatGPT-like AI systems that integrate with help desk software, suggesting drafts of replies to customer tickets that are both “relevant and customized to the support agents” (in theory).
Interestingly, Yuma “got started by accident,” according to founder Guillaume Luccisano.
“This is my third YC startup after Socialcam and Triplebyte,” he writes in the Y Combinator database entry for Yuma.
By way of background, Socialcam was a mobile photo-sharing app that Autodesk acquired in 2012, while Triplebyte is a recruiting and technical screening platform aimed at enterprise tech companies.
“I released Yuma as a prototype for fun in mid-December 2022, and was overwhelmed with demo requests,” Luccisano said. “That’s when I knew I was onto something and had to turn this into a real company, once again.”
Yuma isn’t very obviously like ChatGPT, but rather takes inspiration from the chatbot’s technical underpinnings: text-generating AI models. Customers can train Yuma’s AI models on historical tickets, having it mimic the writing style of a brand and optionally automatically translate between languages for service agents.
“There are thousands of Shopify merchants around the world generating more than $10 million a year. Most of them have taken over some niches and are great at what they do: selling their products,” Luccisano writes. “But they all have one thing in common: they all hate customer support. It’s a burden for them and a huge source of cost, as they receive hundreds of requests per day … Yuma is solving this in a few ways.”
Yuma, it should be pointed out, has competition in spades. There’s Writer, which deploys home-cooked AI text models to power up enterprise copy. Elsewhere, Forethought is attempting to build more accurate customer service chatbots with constrained AI models. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg — see ventures like Lang, Neuron7 and Ultimate.ai.
Image Credit To Carol Yepes/ Getty
Credit To TechCrunch
