12
SPOTLIGHT
Back to Contents
THE IT SOCIETY / Issue 01/2018
In for the Long Haul:
Getting Serious with Bus Uncle
ABHILASH MURTHY Founder, Bus Uncle Company Age: 26 Earliest Tech Experience: Learning how to code in Java at age 10 Currently Watching: Trollhunters Stress Therapy: Netflixing, Deep House music Favourite Animated Movies: Lion King, Tarzan, Coco Favourite Reads: Mashable, Tech in Asia, Elon Musk (autobiography)
The next time you want to know when your bus will arrive – try asking Bus Uncle. Launched in October 2016, Bus Uncle is a chatbot that has delighted users with his gruff yet friendly responses, delivered in pitch perfect Singlish. The IT Society meets the man behind Bus Uncle – Abhilash Murthy, who shares more about how Bus Uncle grew from being a side project to his full-time job.
Q: Question, AM: Abhilash Murthy THE JOURNEY SO FAR Q: Bus Uncle has been a huge hit since launch. Did you expect this to happen? AM: No, Bus Uncle started out as a fun side project for me to learn how chatbots worked. When I created the first version of Bus Uncle I put it on my own Facebook page, thinking that my friends and I will be the only ones to use it. As it appears, my friends liked it and shared with their friends. That’s when it just went viral. A little more than two weeks after launch, much to my surprise, there were already over 8,000 people chatting with Bus Uncle. Q: Besides the initial sudden explosion of users, what is another high point for Bus Uncle? AM: There has been a lot of high points, really. But one of the most memorable would have to be when I introduced Bus Aunty (Bus Uncle’s
wife) on April Fool’s Day in 2017. As a joke, I changed Bus Uncle’s profile page to Bus Aunty, and she reached out to Bus Uncle’s users and asked, “Hey, Bus Uncle is missing, have you seen him?” Users could respond by choosing from locations, like the kopitiam, casino or beach. It stirred the interests of many people and they felt engaged. After this experiment, Bus Uncle’s popularity just went off the charts. That was when I learnt the importance of infusing chatbots with strong and unique personalities that stuck. Q: Did you make any mistakes in the course of developing Bus Uncle? AM: Yes, it was not all smooth sailing. I have ever made users upset and irritated. One example was the jokes feature. At first, users were happy to be able to ask Bus Uncle to tell them a joke. Then I thought, I could introduce a daily joke feature where Bus Uncle would tell subscribed users a new joke