Now to plan food, groceries or travel, all you have to do is chat!

 Mobile chat has become one of the most popular ways of communication; it's unobtrusive, discreet, and younger generations have become amazingly adept with their fingers, keying in messages at a pace that almost rivals the speed with which older generations talked.

This phenomenon is now being exploited by a slew of startups that are creating chat platforms for just about everything — to have food and groceries delivered home, to buy products, book travel tickets, plan and book holiday packages, get a doctor's appointment, recharge mobile plans, and to obtain any household service, be it cleaning, painting, laundry or beauty services.

It's as simple as keying in a sentence like `I want biriyani delivered to my residence', followed by the chat app giving you options to get it from, and on getting your acknowledgement, placing the order on your behalf.

In some cases, there are humans at the backend chatting with you, in other cases, there are automated systems doing it, which over time are able to understand you better and offer you options you are most likely to accept. Helpchat, Goodbox, Lookup and MagicTiger are some who have received significant funding, including from those like Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan, serial entrepreneur K Ganesh and TaxiforSure co-founder Aprameya R. Gopalakrishnan, who has invested in Lookup together with others like Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, notes that chat is a simple feature and a familiar paradigm for consumers in India and China. Ankur Singla, co-founder of Helpchat, said that 60-65% of the businesses that chat with customers on their platform have a future transaction possibility.

Helpchat, thats raised $16 million from Sequoia Capital, has more than one lakh businesses listed on the platform and handles over 35,000 chat requests per day, a number growing at more than 10% every week.