PicStarter | Latitude

Client: Latitude
Agency: CHE Proximity
Role: Technical Director (Product and Comms)

Traditional bots can be boring – and often they don’t understand what you’re saying. So we made one that was ‘Betterer’. The Latitude bot allows customers to start their loan application by simply texting a picture of what they want – from holidays to cars to bathroom renovations.

After a few questions (spoken in that infamous Baldwin cheek), the bot could estimate your loan amount, then a personal call with a Betterer would be organised to finalise your application.

The goal of the project was to develop a platform where a user could easy communicate via SMS/MMS to help determine an appropriate loan type. We wanted to avoid the restrictive “Please select A, B or C” options, and took full advantage of natural language processing and machine learning. It leveraged Google Cloud Vision for the image recognition component.

The entire project was built in Python due to it’s support for multi-threading, queuing and natural language processing.