Rulai launches 'low-code' chatbot development tool and raises $6.5 million

Customer experience chatbot developer Rulai has launched a new "low-code" chatbot development tool and raised $6.5 million to roll it out. The development team at Rulai, with offices in Beijing and Campbell, Calif., is helmed by the renowned University of California, Santa Cruz, computer science professor Yi Zhang. Professor Zhang, the company's chief technologist, and her team are launching a product that customer service managers can use to develop chatbots that will perform tasks based on customer conversations, and that can be created without a single line of code. It's an example of how software developers and artificial intelligence systems are writing themselves out of the application development process. Specifically, the Rulai tool was designed for customer service managers.