You can hardly visit a commercial website these days without having a bot pop up with an offer to engage in a conversation. Startup Passage.AI is betting that those automated characters can be used to help as much as to annoy.

The company is emerging from stealth mode today with $3 million in seed funding and the promise of technology that can help anyone create artificial intelligence-driven chatbots without writing code.

Passage.AI’s bot-building tool uses deep learning and natural language processing to enable bots to understand the context for a request, regardless of how it’s expressed, the company said. It uses “long short-term memory,” a type of neural network that is optimized for language comprehension and handwriting recognition.

“There are other chatbot solutions, but not all of them have NLP tech that’s smart enough to recognize any way you express what you’re looking for,” said Ravi N. Raj, Passage.AI’s founder and chief executive. “We’ve trained these models with a lot of data. It’s almost at the point where it’s like interacting with a human.”

The company uses a natural language classifier to determine intent, and it has the capability of persistence, meaning that it understands the context for follow-on questions. The software supports 15 different user interface formats, including speech, text, cards and question answering. It can also be integrated with a variety of interactive devices, including Facebook Inc.’s Messenger, Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa and Google LLC’s Home. Among the company’s more than 20 corporate customers are Kohl’s Corp. and Udacity Inc.

Investments in the chatbot industry jumped 229 percent between 2015 and 2016 from a small base, according to Business Insider Intelligence. More intriguing is the potential the technology has to save on salary expenses by replacing human operators. Savings could total as much as $65 billion annually, Business Insider estimated.

Passage.AI is targeting uses in customer service, marketing, information technology operations automation, human resources automation and retail. It can be used, for example, to help customers locate items within a store, fill out forms by text or voice, check flight and vacation schedules and answer common customer service questions about availability, hours and pricing. It can also potentially diagnose common health problems by asking a series of  standard questions and working through a decision tree, Raj said.

Passage.AI is software-as-a-service sold on a subscription basis. Pricing is based upon the use case, number of customers and amount of custom integration required.

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