Published On: 2017-01-09

Kolkata-  MyPrivateTutor (www.myprivatetutor.com), an online marketplace for tutors, has released a chatbot for helping students and parents find tutors, trainers, coaching classes and training institutes near them. 

The chatbot works on Facebook Messenger and through a series of interactive questions helps users find tutors of their choice from over 200,000 tutors teaching over 500 subjects in 20+ cities in India. The chatbot works on any device on which Messenger works and can be accessed by simply typing myprivatetutor on Messenger.

“Using artificial intelligence, the chatbot helps us reach a wider segment of users who are still not comfortable navigating websites and apps but are quite savvy with messaging apps”, said Sandip Kar, co-founder & CEO of MyPrivateTutor. Facebook Messenger has over 1 billion users globally and has over 30,000 chatbots already on the platform.

MyPrivateTutor, based in Kolkata, matches tutors to students using proprietary machine learning algorithms. While demand for tutors of school-level subjects is the strongest, the startup sees healthy demand for tutoring in categories such as college subjects, test preparation, languages, programming and after-school activities. 

The private tutoring market in India is almost entirely unorganised and makes a great use case for leveraging technology to solve the problem of discovering quality tutors. “We have been using basic learning algorithms on our platform for a while now. AI platforms have been developing rapidly and this allows us to use the technology to better serve our users”, said Anindya Kar, co-founder of MyPrivateTutor.

Chatbots have been growing exponentially in the last year or so. There are are chatbots for finding restaurants, booking hotel rooms, flight tickets and a variety of other uses. MyPrivateTutor’s chatbot is the first chatbot in India to help find qualified tutors and trainers.