Clear and accurate communication has been fundamental in how well companies, cities and even nations have handled the Covid-19 pandemic but there has been much confusion about which advice is verified, accurate and, most importantly, up-to-date.
One travel company that has pounced on the chance to address this need is Bespoke Inc., a chatbot startup based out of Tokyo, that has pivoted its focus for travel and hospitality to health and public services.
Said founder and CEO, Akemi Tsunagawa, “We were one of the first to come up with a chatbot for Covid back in January.”
Referring to The Diamond Princess cruise ship that was quarantined in Yokohama in February – the first major outbreak outside of China, she said that sparked a clear shift in enquiries from travel-based requests to health and safety.
So, Bespoke quickly adjusted its chatbots to focus more on public health and transit authorities. “Long story short, we don’t go after travel entities anymore. Right now, the only opportunities that we see are in public services.”
Bespoke is currently partnered with the Japanese government in handling the emergency, with a new product that can relay any state-approved information efficiently.
Destinations, local governments and airports have been the fastest to implement Bespoke’s technology. It works directly with local prefectures and at least five local cities in Japan.
Tsunagawa explained that the bigger challenge was in handling government teams and their expectations regarding the product. She described Japan’s tourism ministry as “more frank and progressive” while other sectors were just “different”. The company found that the content the government wanted to send out wasn’t necessarily aligned with what people wanted to know.
As the crisis spread, Bespoke’s chatbots could identify clear trends in what people were most concerned about. The end of January saw queries about where to buy face masks. By early February, conversations focused more on understanding travel restrictions. Then, it became something of a symptoms checker. All the while, those ‘stuck’ in Japan wanted to know how to get home.
Bespoke thus released its own product – CrisisConnect – to relay more appropriate information based on user demand, from verified sources. “We only source reliable content from the United Nations, CDC… we also customise content if our clients have unique content that they want to distribute [to customers].”
By end-March, Tsunagawa said the bots also began picking up more “heartbreaking messages” from people who had been unable to get through on emergency phone lines or had been turned away from emergency rooms. Bespoke could see how users were desperate to try any window of communication, in case it could help reach someone.
Tsunagawa readily addressed Bespoke’s limitations, saying “we’re just a chatbot… there’s not much we can do by that point.”
However, it was clear that there was need for more sensitive and careful messaging. The company developed a new engine to be more sympathetic to users, by programming the chatbot to respond with more emotive language.
Overall, it didn’t take long for Bespoke’s chatbots to evolve to address health and emergency-related queries. In fact, the startup began developing crisis management tools back in 2018, although the focus was more on natural disasters. “Ours was always about typhoons, earthquakes and volcanoes – not pandemics.”
However, the rapid escalation of the crisis was something of an aid to Bespoke Inc. in its ability to gather data quickly enough to help rework the product. “We were lucky enough to capture large volumes of data from January to March related to coronavirus questions. We had more than enough training data to redo our model,” explained Tsunagawa.
Beyond crisis response, Bespoke Inc. is also launching a new product this week – BeAssist – focused on helping SMEs develop their self-service capabilities, to help businesses once they begin to reopen. A large number of Japanese retail and F&B outlets are still entirely offline.
“There’s no real way to get in touch with them… initially we thought providing a simple chatbot they could install on their website, but that’s nothing new. So I thought, what if we actually help people with no website [or social media] to be able to get in touch with their customers.”
BeAssist helps these small businesses create their own chatbots to answer simple questions from customers.
Beyond its pivot and expansion into health, retail and F&B, Bespoke has also been actively recruiting new staff from within the travel industry. “We find [experienced] people who wouldn’t join us during normal times… now the travel industry is dead, we have been able to get good talents outside of Japan to join our team.”
