Executive Interview
Executive Interviews
An Interview with
Chris Shum
Asiabots Limited
CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER
Located in HK Science Park, Asiabots Ltd. is a company focused on A.I. & voice technology development. It starts from 2017 deploying its technology in medical areas, and gradually expand on other industries such as banking, insurance, hospitality, property and more.
Asiabots is famous for its Natural Language Processing (NLP) Technology which can handles Cantonese, Chinese and English. Besides, its self-developed humanlike natural voice engine (TTS) with various styles of sounds are appreciated by industries.
Unique products and Services
- Conversational A.I. Chatbot on omni-channels with an easy to use broadcasting engine.
-A.I. telephone call (in-bound and out-bound call)
-A.I. Ambassador / Virtual Agent
Publish Date:
15 November 2020
Hong Kong
Location:
Tell us about your background, and how you came to found your company?
Chris Shum is a serial entrepreneur who has founded 2 companies before forming Asiabots Limited. Starting his journey by forming its first company in Hong Kong, Netherlands and China. The first company was a multi national fashion accessories manufacturer and distributer. They had formed a B2B e-commerce platform since 2010 and expanded to Europe, Africa and South America.
Later on he started the second company in Hong Kong at 2014 which was focused on apps building and NFC technology development. In 2017 he formed Asiabots with other partners in Science park where this company was focused on Artifical Intelligence. Asiabots focused on building A.I. chatbot services for clients and in 2020 expanded to setting out products on voice, A.I. telephony and A.I. customer services.
Chris Shum was graduated from Chinese University of Hong Kong, with major degree on Philosophy, double minor degrees in business and European Languages. In 2010 graduated from master of business (China business) and 2020 master of finance in Polytechnic University of Hong Kong.
What is most important to you and your organization – mission, vision, or core values? Why?
Vision
Leveraging A.I. on customer service and communication in order to helping people liberate from routine tasks is the vision of Asiabots. Under the assistance of A.I., human beings should be released from low value routine tasks where they can put more energy on real and sincere communications and human-to-human relationship building.
Mission
Providing an omni-channel A.I. communication services by A.I. to handle communication services no matter they are routine tasks or in emergency, 24 hours a day, 365 a year.
Core Value
Integrity, sustainability, humanized services are the core values. The services A.I. provide should be a reliable, long term service and to be human friendly. The services should be built on an open and trustable base platform.
Can you explain briefly how your service(s)/product(s) works?
The core of A.I. Customer service is a kind conversational A.I. where composed by natural language processing, voice and speech recognition technologies. They are servicing on multi platforms (omni-channels) to serve humans all the time when needed.
How has the industry been changing in recent years?
The most obvious adoption is chatbot in this area. More and more companies are using it on their website, app or instant messenger for automation in communication. Believing more adoptions will be happening in these several years where extended to traditional areas. Some A.I. customer robots were appearing, more products are debuting where can provide more satisfactory service and experience.
What makes you different from what’s currently available in the market?
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Asiabots is a company which has a balance in R&D and product development. It is strong at technology development where it is one of the first companies in Hong Kong tackling Cantonese and some dialects, experienced to handle complicated scenarios and provides high quality of services. It is a company creates many unique voices / sounds. Asiabots has built a large voice library where they have created many human-like voices. It is even the one created the voice of Kobe Bryant (a NBA basket ball player who has passed away) and some signature voices such as Donald Trump.
It is not a company only focusing on technology building but also focus on delivery of services that can be used in daily life. Asiabots is willing to try to develop many new services to explore new markets and new adoptions. Starting from 2017 Asiabots created omni-channel chatbots where can be deployed on all instant messengers, apps, web platforms and robots. In 2019 it started to create voicebot, a A.I. customer service on telephone communication, In 2020 it created A.I. ambassador where it is a virtual avatar that can be talked to and visualized on screen.
What does the future hold for your company?
Asiabots, similar to other A.I. companies in development, the last 3 years we were working on building technology and looking for markets to deploy our services. Asiabots will be focus on deploying its technologies on those industries which as great need of A.I. customer services, such as financial areas, medical areas and property areas....etc. Asiabots will keep building unpredecented products and services which are more fitting to these areas and provide more value-added services on them.