Bringing AI-powered Communication to Main Street

We selected PubNub for our new company because we had a great experience with PubNub at our previous company. At that company, before we discovered PubNub, we had several engineers spend the better part of a year trying to build the basics of real-time publish-subscribe functionality. It was complicated, expensive to build and maintain, and lacked functionality. We quickly shut that product down when we discovered PubNub because it was clear that PubNub was going to be a more affordable, faster, and more reliable solution. Joel Grossman Co-founder of NumberAI

When it comes to providing an AI-enhanced chat experience, natural conversation - and the speed to deliver it - is mission critical. Businesses must be able to reliably chat with any number of users simultaneously, and provide valuable and relevant answers to users, whether the response is automated or human-powered. Users expect assistance and answers in real time. NumberAI simplifies that functionality for Main Street businesses. NumberAI is a real-time conversation platform for Main Street that brings AI-powered communication to the phone line, text-enabling businesses of all sizes in an easy and intuitive way. The product rescues missed callers--lost business--and uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automatically reply to common questions that a business receives and completes common tasks (taking food orders, for example) that generate new revenue. When the AI cannot handle a customer, an employee is notified to ensure a rapid response.

Real-time is Everything

NumberAI's product, Numa, allows businesses to communicate more quickly and conveniently with their customers. In order to deliver on the experience, several features (including message delivery!) must happen in real time. NumberAI considered a variety of ways to deliver an enhanced real-time communication experience, from SMS to push notifications and beyond, but ultimately concluded that PubNub was the most effective and efficient. PubNub is used to power all real-time messaging and interactivity in the app between customers and the chatbot.

Open Source vs. Hosted Service

NumberAI experimented with both hosted real-time services and open source options ensure seamless real-time experiences. The challenge was working out how best to ramp up as the number of devices increased at an unpredictable rate. In looking for their real-time messaging backend, reliability and scale were major factors.

We had to justify the investment needed to get the quality and consistency we needed. We dabbled with PubNub, Ably, and using open source WebSockets. Ultimately, we found PubNub the right fit for what we're doing, Joel Grossman Co-Founder of NumberAI

From Prototype to Deployment

For companies looking to move fast and get to market quicker, choosing, testing, prototyping, and deploying technologies without wasting substantial resources and time is critical. PubNub’s extensible infrastructure and expansive support of programming languages and frameworks through 70+ SDKs gave NumberAI the flexibility to focus on building their product rather than sifting between, or building, infrastructure and services.

One of the best parts about working with PubNub is that we were able to start out really simple and prove out parts of our early product and then layer in more functionality as we got into deeper product problems.

Rigorous Reliability Requirements

A core component of NumberAI’s strategy revolves around alignment with telcos. Because nearly every business in the world deals with a telecom or business communications provider in one way or another, they are eager to work with NumberAI to bring the next wave of innovative solutions. However, telecoms are demanding in their product reliability and quality requirements, so delivering a seamless and rock-solid product is fundamental to NumberAI’s success.

With PubNub, we've found the product to be incredibly reliable and haven’t had any significant issues around delivery. We’re always finding new ways to use the PubNub service as our product evolves. For example, we’re continuously improving our use of channel groups as we enhance our product.

PubNub = Faster, More Reliable, and More Affordable

We selected PubNub for our new company because we had a great experience with PubNub at our previous company. At that company, before we discovered PubNub, we had several engineers spend the better part of a year trying to build the basics of real-time publish-subscribe functionality. It was complicated, expensive to build and maintain, and lacked functionality. We quickly shut that product down when we discovered PubNub because it was clear that PubNub was going to be a more affordable, faster, and more reliable solution.