Smart Chatbot: startup created to digitize the Uzbek language

On October 21, Uzbekistan celebrates the Day of the Uzbek language.  The date of the celebration was not chosen by chance: it was on this day in 1989 that the Law “On the State Language” was adopted.  One can talk endlessly about the importance of preserving the language, because without a language there is no people.

And today, as part of the Startup Story column, we invited Ruzmat Safarov to visit to learn about the Smart Chatbot project.

Ruzmat Safarov is 27 years old.  He works as an artificial intelligence researcher at the institute of Mathematics named after V.I. Romanovsky at the academy of sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan and as a mentor for Machine Learning/Deep Learning at the Isystem IT Academy.

How did the idea to create a startup come about?

As Ruzmat recalls, he was inspired to create such an initiative by a desire to contribute to the digitization of the Uzbek language:

“I have long dreamed of doing something useful for the digitization of the Uzbek language.  To do this, I started researching in natural language processing and realized that a corpus of the Uzbek language would be essential for any experiment.  Together with our team members, we created the Uzbek language corpus using articles and e-books written fluently in the Uzbek language.  On this corpus, we trained modern artificial intelligence models, and then analyzed the market to implement these models in industries, and saw that, first of all, there is a demand for smart chatbots”.

The Smart Chatbot project is an artificial intelligence-based intelligent chatbot system that allows you to speed up the customer service desk in commercial and government organizations, avoid waiting in line and provide 24/7 customer service.

Now 5 people are working on the project:

• Rifkat – CTO & Co-founder, Data scientist, responsible for model training and model deploy. In addition, he is involved in all processes within the project and is responsible for expanding the project in terms of product composition;

• Samariddin – co-founder, software engineer.  He leads the development team to achieve high goals in the shortest possible time, and also studies new technologies and plans to implement them in the near future;

• Zhavohir — Full stack web developer – responsible for the frontend, backend and database of the platform;

 • Zilola – Graphic and SMM designer – responsible for visual communication in all media;

 • and Ruzmat himself – CEO & Co-founder – responsible for studying, training and deploying models in the field of artificial intelligence, as well as building investor relations, attracting investment rounds and closing deals.

What benefit does this startup bring to society/people?

As Ruzmat recalls, at the initial stage, the team faced some difficulties:

“As you know, big data is needed to build models using artificial intelligence algorithms.  But we have practically no ready-made data sets in this area.  In addition, all members of our team are specialists in the field of science, and we had difficulties with building a marketing strategy and developing a business model.  However, all this did not scare us, but, on the contrary, motivated us to develop”.

The team did their best: the project was a success and now Smart Chatbot brings great benefits to business owners:

“Our startup aims to provide convenient, high-quality, round-the-clock service to its customers and collect information about customers, and for government organizations it is convenient because it allows you to serve citizens in a timely manner, while preventing unnecessary fuss and running around.  For example, a user sends a message in Uzbek through the application.  Our bot will determine the purpose of the user's request and send the message to the right department or the right company specialist.  Thus, the problem will be solved sooner, and the person does not need to waste time going somewhere or calling and waiting for the operator to answer the call”.

The benefits of the startup were appreciated: the team won $10,000 in the final stage of the Best Startup competition organized by Unicorns SCO, the Youth Affairs Agency, the Youth Entrepreneurship Support Center of Uzbekistan, the Youth is Our Future Foundation and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

How do you plan to develop your project?

Currently, the project is self-financed, but the team wants to attract foreign investors to enter the international level:

“We have big goals that we hope to achieve in the near future.  For example, we plan to start production in the fall of 2022, in 2023 we will take 70% of the Uzbek market.  We do not plan to stop there: we plan to conquer the market of Central Asia, namely Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in 2024”.

The startup industry of Uzbekistan is gaining momentum, Ruzmat notes, so the team sees great prospects in entering the market:

“We see that our country has just begun to develop in this direction, and this is largely due to the activities of IT Park and venture funds.  Positive changes make us very happy.  The contribution to the startup ecosystem of Uzbekistan and the new opportunities created by the government leave us no doubt about success.  For those who still have doubts, I advise you to act and not be afraid of difficulties, and then everything will work out”.