The supply of Massive Language Fashions (LLMs) has made it simpler for builders to make chatbots. Massive corporations resembling OpenAI, Google and Microsoft have made ChatGPT, Bard and Bing Chat broadly accessible. Nevertheless, non-tech prosperous audiences won’t concentrate on a few of these bots. Spain-based Luzia is attempting to introduce AI chatbot tech to customers via a WhatsApp-based bot.
The corporate, based in 2023 by Álvaro Martínez Higes, Javier Andrés and Carlos Pérez, is attempting to handle the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking marketplace for chatbots. Utilizing Luzia is fairly straightforward. It can save you the chatbot as a contact in your cellphone and begin speaking to it on WhatsApp or Telegram.
Luzia co-founders from left: Javier Andrés, Carlos Pérez, and Álvaro Martínez Higes. Picture Credit: Luzia
The startup mentioned greater than 17 million customers have interacted with Luzia so far, with 8 million of them energetic on a month-to-month foundation. Whereas it didn’t point out its day by day energetic customers, the startup mentioned it receives 13 million day by day requests.
Martínez Higes instructed TechCrunch that most individuals ahead Luzia as a contact to have their associates chat with the bot.
The corporate makes use of your cellphone quantity to detect the nation that you simply’re in and begins speaking in Spanish or Portuguese. As the corporate is increasing within the U.S., Luzia will begin talking in English, however in the event you discuss to it in Spanish, it would default to Spanish. However on condition that it depends on GPT tech, it may converse in different languages as nicely.
Luzia at present is suitable with customers in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Spain, Mexico and now the U.S.
The concept is to introduce Luzia to customers who won’t find out about AI fashions. The corporate mentioned that quite a lot of first-time customers evaluate the bot with a voice assistant, resembling Siri or Alexa. Whereas the app reveals a primary onboarding message with a number of the use instances, the startup just isn’t actively sending instructional messages to customers to allow them to find out about completely different units of options.
The corporate makes use of a mix of fashions resembling GPT 3.5/4, Llama, and Kandinsky to energy the interplay. Similar to every other chatbot, customers can ask Luzia to generate textual content for e-mail or reply questions. They’ll additionally ahead a voice observe or an audio file for the bot to transcribe it. Plus, Luzia can generate pictures primarily based on the given immediate.
Asking Luzia in regards to the climate. Picture Credit: Luzia
Luzia just lately raised $10 million in Sequence A funding led by Khosla Ventures. Different traders participated, resembling Basketball Corridor of Famer Pao Gasol, A* Capital, Summary Ventures, FJ Labs, Globo Enterprise, Mike Santos of Technisys, Sean Ryan of Sean Investments LTD and Grupo Product. Earlier than this spherical, the corporate had raised $3 million.
The corporate is protecting the bot free for the second and specializing in development and creating person worth.
“We’ve seen monetization instruments like unlocking limitless messages, long-length transcriptions and giving entry to higher fashions via paid plans. However these are rapidly turning into commoditized within the trade. If we’d have gone with that route, we’d have been lifeless,” Martínez Higes mentioned.
Adina Tecklu, a accomplice at Khosla Ventures, mentioned that Luzia is positioned nicely to handle the non-public assistant market. Tecklu added that simply addressing the LatAm and the Iberian Peninsula market is a big alternative.
“I’ve been this house for a while — how can AI really energy client interactions. In Luzia, we noticed a robust workforce with a really deep understanding of their client base leading to thrilling early traction. Their product is actually resonating with Spanish and Portuguese customers and having such early person traction is spectacular,” Tecklu instructed TechCrunch over e-mail.
This 12 months, Khosla has invested in a number of startups engaged on AI and LLM tech, together with studying coach app Ello and conversational studying app Quazel.