These days, chatbots have begun to be inserted into our everyday vernacular — after the dawn of the ChatGPT by OpenAI.
Chatbots at a more local level, though, haven't been a main part of the conversation. In the local entrepreneurial ecosystem, that soon will change.
That’s because Amplify Louisville is about to launch Eva, a custom-built chatbot that will be able to respond to specific questions that pertain to the ecosystem.
If all goes as scheduled, the plan is to demo Eva at its upcoming Ignite Innovation Celebration networking event at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 19, at West Sixth NuLu.
“If it does what we think it's supposed to do, it’s really like having a junior employee that is on all the time,” said Larry Horn, CEO and co-founder of Amplify Louisville on trying to “meet founders at their needs, when they need it where they need it.”
He said that Eva represented a chance to provide the resources of his innovation hub to a larger group of people any time of day.
“Whether you work third shift, whether you live in Bullitt County, whatever it is you can get access to something that will give you information [and] give you direction … so we can help people go down that path before they have to take time off and come and see us,” Horn said.
In addition, although Eva is being trained to know the ins and outs of the startup scene in the Louisville metro area, users from across Kentucky were encouraged to try it out as well, given that it should has a base of knowledge for founders within the state regardless of where they live.
The Amplify team tested the first version in July, but it still had some kinks to work out before it was ready to be unveiled to a larger audience.
Eva’s launch, Horn said, has been further delayed due to the CEO of the startup company that they were working with to create the bot — Pava LaPere of Baltimore-based EcoMaps — was murdered on Sept. 25, in a case that has grabbed national headlines.
Horn added that Amplify was the first customer of EcoMaps with an order for what is known as their EcoBot back in April. To his knowledge, none other of his counterparts in the similar-sized U.S. cities have rolled out a chatbot in their communities.
“I talked to a couple of my counterparts from across the country,” he said. “They all think this is pretty interesting … We’re the guinea pigs.”
Amplify Louisville, which opened its offices in 2020, is one of six innovation hubs located throughout Kentucky that are part of the system of KY Innovation, the entrepreneurial arm of the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development.
The other five KY Innovation hubs are: Awesome, Inc. (Lexington); Blue North (Covington); GroWest (Paducah); Central Region Ecosystem for Arts, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CREATE, Bowling Green) and Shaping Our Appalachian Region (SOAR, Pikeville).
