Greywing’s new SeaGPT solves email overwhelm for maritime crew managers

Each time a member of their crew adjustments, maritime crew managers must deal with immigration rules, COVID necessities and journey plans for every particular person. That is normally accomplished by emails with port brokers, and might rapidly result in an amazing variety of messages, despatched throughout a number of time zones, particularly if a number of persons are leaving or onboarding. To simplify the method, Greywing, the Singapore-based maritime intelligence platform backed by traders like Flexport and Y Combinator, introduced as we speak it has developed SeaGPT, an AI chatbot based mostly on GPT4 tech.

In a press release, Greywing CEO Nick Clarke stated e mail overwhelm is the highest downside crew managers ask them to repair. SeaGPT is newest of the startup’s instruments for automating crew adjustments. The present model (Greywing plans to proceed growing it and including new use instances) simplifies the method by automating components of the communication course of, like drafting emails with essential questions and extracting essentially the most important data from port company replies for particular crew members.

Greywing co-founder and chief know-how officer Hrishi Olickel instructed TechCrunch that SeaGPT isn’t a plug-and-play generative AI chatbot, however was made potential by developments with GPT4 and a maritime-specific strategy to programming.

He added that e mail overload impacts what number of vessels a crew supervisor can deal with at a time and their means to assemble data for selections. “If a single determination, like a port agent for a single crew change, has data unfold out over seven emails and replies inside PDFs and Excel recordsdata, the probabilities for human error are increased. As well as, maritime is a worldwide trade. When time zones aren’t favorable, crew managers both should be obtainable 24/7 or face multi-day turnaround instances for a dialog.”

For example, one among Greywing’s prospects had an injured grasp that wanted to be evacuated from his ship instantly. This meant that the crew supervisor needed to discover the closest port to the proper medical services. However since they had been close to new ports, an enormous quantity of emails wanted to be despatched to coordinate his departure. Olickel stated SeaGPT may have whittled that point down from hours to minutes.

So how does SeaGPT work? It’s at present obtainable by Greywing’s platform, Slackbot and its cellular app, with plans so as to add integrations to WhatsApp and Groups. Customers can ask SeaGPT questions like “arrange a crew change for me in Melbourne.” Olickel explains that crew managers who’re within the means of switching out crew members must understand how a lot it should value for every particular person leaving and if there are any restrictions, together with COVID vaccination necessities and immigration rules, that they want to concentrate on.

After receiving a request, SeaGPT, which is related to Greywing’s proprietary database overlaying 18,300 ports, seems by all the data and comes again with the mandatory data. It then asks questions like what sort of vessel is concerned, the nationality of individuals onboarding and offboarding and their names. That data is used for SeaGPT to draft emails to be despatched to port brokers. Questions which are typically neglected by busy crew managers are included, together with “are you able to please advise on any immigration or port state restrictions, if PCR checks are required for shore depart and the way a lot it should value.”

To stop errors, SeaGPT doesn’t permit hallucinations, so if the small print requested aren’t obtainable, it flags it as a substitute of assuming of impersonating data. Emails might be despatched by Greywing’s platform and flights might be booked there, too, if wanted.

Olickel explains that when crew managers get emails again, they typically obtain data in numerous codecs. For instance, it may be in a listing, written out in a paragraph and even in numerous languages. SeaGPT helps by translating (languages it will possibly deal with embrace Hindi, Greek, Russian and Mandarin), pulling out per-person prices and historic prices and placing it right into a person’s Greywing information.

SeaGPT is now primarily meant for communication with port brokers, however Olickel stated because it develops additional, Greywing desires it to assist simplify communication between brokers, seafarers and masters into related factors that may be imported as structured information.

“Within the long-term, we count on SeaGPT to be a crew member or govt assistant to the crewing crew, as a device that’s merely copied into communications when obligatory,” he stated. “It runs within the background, retrieving related information and dealing with all communications that don’t want direct involvement, and offering automated determination help for every crew supervisor.”