SMU948

BUS UNCLE CHATBOT – CREATING A SUCCESSFUL DIGITAL

BUSINESS (A)
Is the bus here yet? Oh, I wish I could just ask someone so that I know how much longer I have
to wait!

September 2016 – The idea to create Bus Uncle sparked while Abhilash Murthy was waiting for Bus
65 along Singapore’s Orchard Road. After putting in a long day at work, Abhilash was tired and
hungry. He simply wanted to go home. But his bus was nowhere in sight despite him waiting for 25
minutes.

“When is the bus coming?” was the simple problem that he wanted to solve. Despite the availability
of several bus apps, he did not want to use any of them, as “there was too much information”. Neither
did he want to walk to a bus stop where there was an electronic bus board that displayed the bus
arrival times. Like the bus apps, the electronic bus boards also displayed too much information. He
simply wanted to ask someone when the bus was coming.

Since Facebook Messenger had just launched chatbots on its platform, Abhilash decided to jump on
the bandwagon and create a chatbot to solve the problem. Trained as a software engineer, he took just
one weekend to hack out a chatbot prototype that he could ping to ask when the bus was coming. The
chatbot prototype was later renamed Bus Uncle and given a persona that typified a Singaporean bus
captain – grumpy, snarky but helpful.

Abhilash launched Bus Uncle to the public on October 23, 2016 on his Facebook page. Despite little
interest in the first four days, by the fifth day, the Singapore public took Bus Uncle by storm when
Mothership, a popular local media, featured the chatbot on its platform.1 In just one day, Bus Uncle
went from having 100 users to more than 8,000 users.

What were the reasons why Bus Uncle was so popular? What could Abhilash do to enhance the
chatbot?

Abhilash’s Background

Originally from India, Abhilash moved with his family to Jakarta when he was three years old, living
there for 15 years before moving to Singapore in 2010.

Abhilash developed an interest in coding from a very young age, and was often seen tinkering with

1
Jonathan Lim, “'Bus Uncle' is the Most Singaporean Bus Arrival Timing App Ever”, Mothership, October 27, 2016,
https://mothership.sg/2016/10/bus-uncle-is-the-most-singaporean-bus-arrival-timing-app-ever/, accessed March 2021.

This case was written by Wong Yuet Nan, Associate Professor Hoe Siu Loon and Dr. Jovina Ang at Singapore Management
University. The case was prepared solely to provide material for class discussion. The authors do not intend to illustrate either
effective or ineffective handling of a managerial situation. The authors may have disguised certain names and other identifying
information to protect confidentiality.

Copyright © 2021, Singapore Management University Version: 2021-05-21

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 SMU-21-0004 Bus Uncle Chatbot – Creating a Successful Digital Business (A)

software. By the time he was 12 years old, he could write programmes in Java 2. He added,

We had a very simple computer [at home] and it was too slow for the games that I was playing.
I would try to find scripts online and edit the scripts so that I could manipulate the computer
through the scripts.

Because he loved programming, Abhilash knew from an early age that he wanted to be a software
engineer. When the opportunity arose for him to pursue his studies in Information Systems at
Singapore Management University (SMU), without any hesitation, he decided to move to Singapore
alone.

Abhilash excelled in his studies at SMU. He even pursued a second major in Advanced Business
Technology to broaden his knowledge of new technology. When Facebook launched its inaugural
Hackathon in Singapore, he and three other friends at SMU signed up to compete and secured a place
in the finals at Facebook Headquarters.

Starting Out at TradeGecko

Fresh out of university, Abhilash started as a Software Engineer Graduate Trainee at UBS, an
investment bank. Only after working at the bank for a year did he decide to move to a start-up, and
joined TradeGecko 3, a two-year old start-up that focused on providing a cloud-based Amazon-like
supply chain order and inventory management system for small and medium enterprises. Given that
the team was lean, he was immediately roped in to develop software for the growing start-up.

TradeGecko was founded by brothers Cameron and Bradley Priest, and Carl Thompson. 4 The three
New Zealanders ran the company like a tight ship as they had just secured US$650,000 seed funding
from WaveMaker Labs and Golden Gate Ventures. 5 Daily standups were a part of the software
development process. During the standups, team members were expected to give a 20-second update
on their work, what they would work on next, and whether they were encountering any blockers.
Sprints were held every six weeks during which new tasks would be assigned to the software
engineers and designers.

Even though Abhilash worked at TradeGecko for only two years, he thoroughly enjoyed his time
there.

I had so much fun working at TradeGecko. Work certainly didn’t feel like work at all! And I got
to learn so much.

The founders created a culture that was centred on experimentation and they encouraged all members
of the small team to be independent and take charge of their own career paths. Everyone who worked

2
Java was one of the top three programming languages in the world. It was an open source programming language that was platform
independent and could run on both mobile and desktop devices.
3
Cameron Priest, “The Story Behind TradeGecko’s USD 10M Series B Announcement”, Intuit Quickbooks, July 23, 2018,
https://www.tradegecko.com/blog/tradegecko/the-story-behind-tradegeckos-usd-10m-series-b, accessed March 2021.
4
Intuit Quickbooks, “Our Founding Story”, https://www.tradegecko.com/about-us, accessed March 2021.
5
Digital News Asia, “Investors Get Sticky with TradeGecko”, December 18, 2012, https://www.digitalnewsasia.com/sizzle-fizzle-
slow-burn/investors-get-sticky-with-tradegecko, accessed April 2021.

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 SMU-21-0004 Bus Uncle Chatbot – Creating a Successful Digital Business (A)

there was encouraged to have a side project. And they specifically told Abhilash, “The best path you
could take is to leave us and build your own start-up.”

He was exposed to the methods of Design Thinking, Lean Start-up and Agile for developing software,
even though in his words, “the methods employed at TradeGecko did not follow the textbooks to a
t”. Despite having responsibility for developing front-end user interfaces and interactions, he had to
learn how the whole technological stack was tied together so that his work output could be seamlessly
integrated to the back-end. He also gained an appreciation of the importance of design, and elaborated,

At TradeGecko, we put a lot of thought into how everything was designed because we wanted to
create an addictive user experience. We even incorporated design into the colour and size of the
buttons!

The Idea to Create Bus Uncle

2016 was the year when chatbots were the rage in the technological industry. All major technological
companies were focusing on chatbots. In April 2016, Facebook released chatbots on its Messenger
platform.6 Google followed suit a month later with the announcement of a new chat service called
Allo.7 And Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, said that chatbots would “fundamentally revolutionise
how computing is experienced by everybody.”8

The idea to create a chatbot was sparked on a late evening in September 2016 when Abhilash was
waiting for a bus to arrive. Given that he wanted to ask someone when the bus was coming, the idea
of a chatbot fitted the bill. Talking to himself, he thought,

Wouldn’t it be cool if I had a chatbot that I could ask when my bus is coming?

On the bus ride home, he visualised what this chatbot would look like. Getting excited, as soon as he
reached home, he started working on the chatbot prototype on Facebook Messenger.

Abhilash knew what type of chatbot he wanted to create. He did not want one that gave uninspiring
and robotic answers, or one that responded based on a structured prompt tree. Instead, he wanted to
create a human-like chatbot – a chatbot that he could converse with, as well as one that had a bit of
humour so that users would have a delightful experience interacting with it. He explained,

Chatbots don't have any user interface. There’s no design element, no buttons and no menu. You
send it a message and it returns one. It’s easy to create a functional and utilitarian chatbot. Given
that chatbots were still very new then, what I’d notice was that when people speak to chatbots,
they generally feel defensive and uncomfortable. I wanted to create something that makes people
feel good and familiar while interacting with it.

6
Josh Constine, “Facebook Launches Messenger Platform with Chatbots”, Techcrunch, April 13, 2016,
https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/12/agents-on-messenger/, accessed April 2021.
7
Jennifer Booton, “Google Follows Facebook into Chatbots”, MarketWatch, May 19, 2016,
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-follows-facebook-into-chatbots-2016-05-18, accessed April 2021.
8
Khari Johnson, “Microsoft CEO: Chatbots will ‘Fundamentally Revolutionise’ Computing”, Venture Beat, July 11, 2016,
https://venturebeat.com/2016/07/11/microsoft-ceo-chatbots-will-fundamentally-revolutionize-computing/, accessed April 2021.

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 SMU-21-0004 Bus Uncle Chatbot – Creating a Successful Digital Business (A)

Despite having very little sleep that weekend, by Sunday evening, Abhilash had accomplished his
goal and had a chatbot prototype to show his friends and colleagues. The first thing he did when he
arrived at work the next morning was to get his friends and colleagues to test the chatbot out. While
he received great feedback from the people he reached out to, it was his close friend Chan Yin Yin,
who suggested that the chatbot should speak Singlish 9 and be renamed Bus Uncle so that it could
personify a typical Singaporean bus captain: grumpy, snarky but helpful.

Putting themselves in the shoes of Bus Uncle, the two friends imagined Bus Uncle’s likes and
dislikes, his relationships and interactions with commuters, as well as what he would do in his free
time.

We have seen how grumpy bus uncles can become. At times when the buses are crowded, we have
seen them shouting to the commuters to move to the back of the bus. They might also get grumpy
and start yelling at people when commuters take their own sweet time to get on the bus. At the
same time, we have noticed that the typical bus uncle likes to sit down at the kopitiam (coffee
shop in Hokkien) to drink coffee during their breaks or have a Tiger Beer after work.

As a Singaporean, Yin Yin was well versed in Singlish. She helped Abhilash create a few logical
conversational flows in Singlish while he focused on leveraging artificial intelligence (AI),
specifically Wit.ai10, to create the rules using natural language processing (NLP) to make the chatbot
talk and sound like a human being (see Exhibit 1).

After doing some tweaking and enhancements to the conversational flows, Bus Uncle was ready to
be launched. On 23 October 2016, Abhilash launched Bus Uncle to the public on his Facebook page.
Despite acquiring only 20-30 users per day in the first few days, Bus Uncle became quite popular
when it was featured on Mothership, a local online media platform that was frequently read by
Singaporeans. Within a day, Bus Uncle went from having about 100 users to more than 8,000 users.11

This huge surge of users nearly crashed the web server that hosted Bus Uncle. Abhilash started getting
all sorts of error messages from the server. He knew he had to do something quickly. He immediately
sought help from his colleagues to learn about web server architecting for handling large amounts of
users and data. Within a month, he was able to bolster the chatbot and fix the technological issues by
re-architecting the setup (see Exhibit 2).

Testing and Learning

While he was addressing the technological issues, Abhilash was proactively managing user
relationships and user expectations. Working together with Yin Yin, the two friends shared the wide-
ranging and funny conversations that users were having with Bus Uncle on the Facebook page to

9
Singlish was a variety of English spoken in Singapore – it included words from the many languages and dialects spoken by the people
who lived in Singapore including Malay, Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese and Tamil.
10
Wit.ai was a natural language interface for applications, capable of turning sentences into structured data. It was popular with chatbot
developers as it was easy to make the chatbot interact with human beings on messaging platforms. Wit.ai was acquired by Facebook
in 2015.
11
Jonathan Lim, “'Bus Uncle' is the Most Singaporean Bus Arrival Timing App Ever”, Mothership, October 27, 2016,
https://mothership.sg/2016/10/bus-uncle-is-the-most-singaporean-bus-arrival-timing-app-ever/, accessed March 2021.

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 SMU-21-0004 Bus Uncle Chatbot – Creating a Successful Digital Business (A)

build relationships with them. The conversations with Bus Uncle could be as short as 5 minutes to as
long as 30 minutes.

For example, one person told Bus Uncle that his landlord had kicked him out of the house.

“Uncle, my landlord just kicked me out of my house”

Bus Uncle responded: “Where are you now?” (Guffaws)

“I’m so angry and upset.”

Bus Uncle replied: “There, there. Everything will be okay.”

Abhilash relied heavily on data to make his decisions. He constantly looked for new ways to keep
the users engaged and took every opportunity to communicate with them. He tracked all the messages
from the users to understand the patterns of conversations, so that he could continue to inject the
human element in Bus Uncle’s responses. The Monday joke subscription was a weekly subscription
feature that he introduced. When he decided to get Bus Uncle to tell jokes on a daily basis, the users
told Bus Uncle to stop as they felt that this had become like spam.

The users told him that they wanted Bus Uncle to reply when they said thank you. Thus, Abhilash
programmed the chatbot to say things like (see Exhibit 3 for the definitions of common Singlish
words):

I shy leh.

You happy can already lah.

Okay I love you too.

He also sought feedback about the new features that he was planning to introduce. One important
feature that the user requested was the ability for Bus Uncle to capture the bus stop number. This led
Abhilash to add the image recognition AI feature on the chatbot.

What’s Next for Bus Uncle?

Time had passed quickly. Before Abhilash knew it, December had arrived and Bus Uncle had been
operational for three months. In this time, Bus Uncle had become Singapore’s most popular chatbot
with 20,000 users12 who pinged him regularly to ask for bus arrival times or simply to chat.

Abhilash certainly had learned a lot in this time, especially how people talked to chatbots and what
they felt when they did so. It was clear that the human element was what attracted users to engage
with Bus Uncle.

12 Cherise Fong, “Top 10 Chatbots of Our Times”, Makery – Media for Labs, December 5, 2017,
https://www.makery.info/en/2017/12/05/top-of-the-bots/, accessed April 2021.

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 SMU-21-0004 Bus Uncle Chatbot – Creating a Successful Digital Business (A)

He had also received lots of feedback about why users loved Bus Uncle (see Exhibit 4). He narrated,

People love Bus Uncle because he is witty, sarcastic, funny, informative, and most of all, local
and relatable. When you ask him when the bus is coming, his responses are exactly what you
would expect from a Singaporean bus captain. He responds with lah’s, aiyo’s, jialat’s, walao’s.
He also has a sense of humour. If your wait is longer than 15 minutes, he might even ask you to
lim kopi (drink coffee in Hokkien). 13

Bus Uncle had remained a fun side project for Abhilash. It was not generating any revenue for him
even though all of his free time was dedicated to it. He was still operating alone, with occasional help
from Yin Yin, while holding his full-time job at TradeGecko.

There was still a lot more that Abhilash believed he could do to improve Bus Uncle. The chatbot
could not yet understand human sentiments such as frustration, anger, urgency or kindness. What
else could he do especially when his dream was to maintain Bus Uncle’s position as Singapore’s
most popular chatbot?

13
Interview with Abhilash Murthy on March 2, 2021.

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 SMU-21-0004 Bus Uncle Chatbot – Creating a Successful Digital Business (A)

EXHIBIT 1: SCREENSHOTS OF BUS UNCLE’S RESPONSES

Source: Abhilash Murthy

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 SMU-21-0004 Bus Uncle Chatbot – Creating a Successful Digital Business (A)

EXHIBIT 2: BUS UNCLE TECHNOLOGICAL ARCHITECTURE – DAY 1 VS. DAY 30

Source: Abhilash Murthy, “Presentation to SMU Students”, February 22, 2021.

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 SMU-21-0004 Bus Uncle Chatbot – Creating a Successful Digital Business (A)

EXHIBIT 3: COMMON SINGLISH WORDS AND THEIR MEANING

Singlish Meaning
aiyo An expression of surprise or it could apply to annoyance
as well.
boleh It means can in Malay
chope To reserve or hold something for someone.
lah A suffix used to emphasise the sentence or a prior word.
leh An expression when one is not sure about something or
when one is modest.
jialat A word that is used when nothing is going in one’s favour
or way.
sabo A word that is used to play a practical joke or cause harm.
sian It means tired in Hokkien. It can also mean boredom or a
lack of enthusiasm.
siao It means crazy in Hokkien.
walao An exclamation that means annoyance, disbelief,
frustration or surprise.

Source: Honeycombers, “The Top Singlish Phrases You Must Know to Chat Like a Local”, Honeycombers,
November 6, 2019, https://thehoneycombers.com/singapore/singlish-101/, accessed April 2021.

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 SMU-21-0004 Bus Uncle Chatbot – Creating a Successful Digital Business (A)

EXHIBIT 4: BUS UNCLE SUCCESS FACTORS

Source: Abhilash Murthy, “Presentation to SMU Students”, February 22, 2021.

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