Every time a crew member changes hands, the Marine Crew Managers need to deal with immigration regulations, COVID requirements, and each person’s travel plans. This is usually done through emails with port agents, and can quickly lead to an overwhelming amount of messages, sent across multiple timezones, especially if many people are leaving or joining. To simplify the process, Greywing, the Singapore-based maritime intelligence platform backed by investors like Flexport and Y Combinator, today announced that it has developed SeaGPT, an AI chatbot based on GPT4 technology.
In a statement, Greywing CEO Nick Clark said the tyranny of email was the biggest problem crew managers asked him to solve. SeaGPT is the startup’s latest tools for automating crew changes. The current version (Greywing plans to continue evolving it and add new use cases) streamlines the process by automating parts of the communication process, such as crafting emails with important questions and extracting the most important information from the port agency’s responses to specific crew members.
Greywing founder and chief technology officer Hrishi Olickel told TechCrunch that SeaGPT isn’t a plug-and-play AI chatbot, but it’s made possible by advances in GPT4 and a proprietary approach to programming.
He added that email overload affects the number of ships the crew manager can handle at one time and its ability to gather information to make decisions. “If a single decision, such as an executing agent for one crew change, contains information spread over seven emails and responses within PDFs and Excel files, the chances of human error are higher. Plus, the Navy is a global industry. When time zones matter Unfavorably, crew managers either have to be available 24/7 or face multi-day response times to have a conversation.”
For example, one of Greywing’s clients had an injured master who had to be evacuated from his ship immediately. This meant that the crew manager had to find the nearest outlet to suitable medical facilities. But as they were near new ports, a huge amount of e-mails had to be sent to coordinate his departure. Olickel said SeaGPT could have cut that time from hours to minutes.
So how does SeaGPT work? It’s currently available through the Greywing platform, Slackbot, and its mobile app, with plans to add integrations to WhatsApp and Teams. Users can ask SeaGPT questions such as “setting up a crew change for me in Melbourne”. Olickel explains that crew managers doing the crew member switching process need to know the cost of each person departing and whether there are any restrictions, including COVID vaccination requirements and immigration regulations, that they need to be aware of.
After receiving a request, SeaGPT, linked to Greywing’s own database covering 18,300 ports, searches all information and returns with the necessary information. Then it asks questions such as the type of ship involved, the nationality and names of the people on board and off. This information is used for SeaGPT to craft emails to send to port agents. Questions that busy crew managers often overlook are included, including “Can you advise on any immigration or port status restrictions, if PCR tests are required for shore leave and how much they will cost.”
To prevent errors, SeaGPT does not allow phishing, so if requested details are not available, it flags them rather than assuming an impersonation of the information. Emails can be sent through the Greywing platform and flights can be booked there too, if required.
Olickel explains that when crew managers retrieve emails, they often receive information in different formats. For example, it could be in a list, written in a paragraph or even in different languages. SeaGPT helps by translating (the languages it can handle include Hindi, Greek, Russian, and Mandarin), pulling out individual costs and historical costs and putting them into the user’s Greywing records.
SeaGPT is now primarily intended for communication with port agents, but Olickel said that as it evolves further, Greywing wants to help streamline communication between agents, seafarers, and masters at relevant points that can be imported as structured data.
“In the long term, we expect SeaGPT to be a team member or executive assistant to the crew team, as a tool that is simply copied into communications when necessary,” he said. “It runs in the background, retrieving relevant data and handling all communications that do not need direct involvement, and provides automated decision support to each crew manager.”