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….