Targeting B2C Segment, Prosa.ai Launches SaaS Product "Text-to-Speech"

After experiencing obstacles in business growth due to the pandemic, the developer of the Indonesian Natural Language Processors (NLP) platform prose.ai claims to continue to experience positive growth to date.

To DailySocial.id, Prosa.ai Co-Founder & CEO Teguh Eko Budiarto said, so far the company has focused on the B2B segment from the government, making projects that have been carried out have to be postponed due to transfers. budget. However, in mid-2021, the condition had recovered and the projects that had been delayed were running again.

"On the other hand, I see that the pandemic has accelerated digital adoption. So if it was not the focus before, now many companies and governments have adopted technology to make their work easier," said Teguh.

In its implementation, Prosa.ai has two main products. There is Prose Text for text recognition services, providing services in the form of APIs as well as custom applications. Some of them are news identification hoaxes, hate speeches, opinion extraction, document type classification, special information extraction, basic NLP tools, and others.

"Currently we are still focusing on the two main products. But now it has undergone development, not only conversational AI alone, we have also started to penetrate into regulatory technology," said Teguh.

One of the strategic partnerships that have been established is with Bank Indonesia to risk analysis. Prosa.ai has also established a partnership with the DPR to check regulations. While for service healthcare that counts high regulated, they also claim to have helped the process take advantage of analysis tools which exists.

Mentioned what kind of competition among players who offer similar services, according to Teguh, for Indonesia itself, there are not too many local players. Besides Prosa.ai, there are other local players who are also working on the Indonesian-language NPL, including Media Kernels Indonesia, Bahasa.ai, and Kata.ai.

Most of the players trying to offer a service similar to Prosa.ai are tech giants like Google, Microsoft and others. However, their main capability is more in English for their NLP products.

To accelerate business acceleration, Prosa.ai has plans to raise funds. It is hoped that this process can be launched in the next few months.

The last funding received by Prosa.ai was in 2019 for the series A. The funding was led by GDP Venture. The investment continues initial funding received in 2018 from Kaskus (also a GDP Venture portfolio).

"Our target this year is to achieve business growth up to two times compared to last year," said Teguh.

Launch products in the B2C segment

The latest product that has been launched targeting the B2C segment is SaaS Text-to-Speech (TTS), a solution-based cloud which can meet the needs of converting text into sound.

Prose TTS is equipped with various features that make it easier for users. During the pandemic, the demand that comes is actually a lot from end consumers, especially those content creators to an influencer for the purposes of charging video sound and the like.

"We offer options freemium to the user. For free they can try but with limitations. If they want to enjoy other features, they can subscribe with prices starting from Rp. 50 thousand," said Teguh.

In the future, Prosa.ai also has plans to launch other interesting products that can be utilized by the B2C segment. To expand the business, the company is currently also collaborating with publisher big in Indonesia for generating content E-Books automatically. Another strategic plan that Prosa.ai has begun to look at is to provide Indonesian language options for various platforms such as social media.

"Currently there are companies from China who are exploring cooperation with us. They have a platform text and speech but only for english and mandarin. We still do technical due diligence if the process is complete, hopefully we can become partners so that we can do it request recommendations with them," said Teguh.

According to the report, the global NLP market size has reached $11,6 billion in 2020 and will grow to $35,1 billion in 2026 at a CAGR of 20,3%. The growth of SaaS is due to the complexity of its manufacture. Application developers have a tendency of ready-made services that can be integrated with their creation backend.

Another opportunity, currently there are not many platforms that accommodate the Indonesian language corpus. Meanwhile, the development of the digital ecosystem in the country shows extraordinary traction. Consumers demand increasingly intelligent application services. So the opportunity for artificial intelligence-based services such as TTS is also getting bigger.