SMS services in India – how user friendly are they?

In: SMS| Technology

6 Nov 2007

I never use sms to get information about services ever. Yesterday though I changed my mind and tried out several offerings.

1. Indian Railways – I had heard its one of the most profitable Indian ecom sites. Maybe, but the SMS section sucks big time.

Seat Availability Example:- If a user want to know information regarding to (RSK) Seat Availability, then, they SMS to 56677, in this user has to specify the Train Number , Date and Month and in that very exact order. hmm

Now I am hard pressed to remember the short code leave alone the exact syntax required to get the data from them.

The same problem exists across the board, tried to book a ticket on a leading airline and there had to remember the short code (which btw there are 5000 of similar sounding ones out there) as well as the exact sequence of words – not good at all!!

I hope the SMS providers and content chaps realize that if they roll our a service which does not tax the customers brains it would rock!! eg get me from pune 2 bby tommrow on Jet, where the hell can i get good hotel in cochin, kaunsi picture PVR pe lagi hai etc etc

This got the team thinking – We already had the Alabot engine in place which could understand NLP. GP then sat down to compile a new algorithm (GFA) which would understand complex sentences, break them down and feed them to the Ala engine.

He says it can understand any context in any language and across any platform – the proof of the pudding is in the eating i say!!!

If it works as well as he says it does – I will update this link – if not then atleast we tried….

SMS services in India – how user friendly are they?

1 Response to SMS services in India – how user friendly are they?

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gp

November 18th, 2007 at 3:52 pm

It works Dude !!Thanks for supporting me when I burned mid night oil /debugged in those long cold nights .sighhhhh

Now its the time to Disco… hehe

More details on my blog about GFA

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We are a company working on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing algorithms. Our vision is to “Talk Enable” any application and progressively enhance the reach and usability of local search, enterprise applications and user interface platforms.

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