BotCube

Learn to build a stellar kid skill for Alexa! We are so excited about the language game, we mentioned in the previous post, that we want to publish another great piece of news about it. Join the Amazon professionals for a live webinar on 8.11.2017 to learn what kids find engaging when it comes to voice experiences. They will share tips and best practices for building skills that educate, entertain, and engage kids under 13. Register now to build your best kid skill for a chance to win your share of cash and prizes totaling $250,000 by the Alexa Skills Challenge ‘Kids with Devpost’. http://dev.amazonappservices.com/kids-skills-oct-web-reg.html

Perfect time to step into the voice game to win 25k$ Alexa, the voice service behind Amazon Echo devices and Alexa-enabled products, now supports skills for kids under the age of 13. Which is a good thing, because kids have a lot of questions that need answering. Amazon invites developers from around the world to create Alexa skills for kids. If your skill makes the grade, you could win big. So what are they looking for? Here are some ideas: 1. Educate – Inspire wonder. Foster kids’ creative problem-solving skills. Cheer them on for a job well done. 2. Entertain – Bring them into the action with interactive experiences. Make it fun. Make them laugh. 3. Engage – Make a strong first impression. Keep their interest. Make it useful so they want to keep coming back. Your skill can be any or all of these things. It can engage one child or several. It can even get the parents involved. Best skills can win 25k$. My team at BotCube is in, and you? https://alexakidskills.devpost.com/

It’s becoming increasingly easy to accomplish tasks with your voice, thanks to the proliferation of intelligent assistants. But voice computing won’t make the graphical user interface obsolete, said Alexa Engine VP Al Lindsay. “When I think about voice, I think it will revolutionize in a natural way the way in which we interface with technology and devices, but it’s not going to replace the graphical user interface”. “If you can imagine a voice reading back to you a list of 10 items so you can get the one you want, it’s probably not the optimal experience”. “So I think there’s a sweet spot of combination of multimodal experiences, where voice forward — which we’re focused on — is supplemented with a screen for glanceable information or viewable information that allows your brain to process things more quickly”. What do you guys think about voice interfaces? Let’s discuss in our @botcubechat. https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/24/alexa-vp-voice-wont-kill-the-graphical-user-interface/

Amazon is testing paid Alexa skills Today, Amazon rolled out a new subscription service that enables Jeopardy! Alexa skill users to get six extra clues per day and the ability to play previous day’s games that were missed. “Amazon introduced the ability for customers to access premium subscription content within the Jeopardy! skill… The developer tools to create subscription skills are currently in preview with Jeopardy!. We’ll notify developers when the tools are more broadly available.” The next logical monetization option will be in-Skill purchases. This can take many forms and in the mobile world is known as in-app purchases. Let’s see how it goes, but I’m super excited 💪🏻 https://www.voicebot.ai/2017/10/24/amazon-alexa-monetization-introduced-1-99-subscription-jeopardy-skill/

Cortana gets its own smart speaker Not one to be left out of the party, there’s now a smart wireless speaker that uses Microsoft’s Cortana assistant. The $199 Harman Kardon Invoke is not hugely different than the Amazon Echo or Google Home. If Microsoft is able to deliver those promised improvements and perhaps make Cortana work better with non-Microsoft services, the Invoke could be a compelling smart speaker for the rest of us. Read full review in this article: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/20/16505468/harman-kardon-invoke-cortana-microsoft-smart-speaker-review

Facebook now allows developers to monetize their Messenger instant games Today Facebook is allowing developers to add in-app purchases as well as interstitial and rewarded video ads Players get a virtual good or bonus life in exchange for watching rewarded videos. Facebook will take a cut of the ads shown in Messenger games that are routed from its Facebook Audience Network, and they’ll begin appearing in some games on iOS and Android. Facebook seems to be taking Messenger Instant Games quite seriously after its desktop game platform withered and mobile gaming was dominated by the App Store and Google Play platforms. Facebook sees an opportunity to not only give people something to do between chat conversations and a way to challenge friends, but also now to start squeezing more cash out of the 1.3 billion Messenger users without interrupting the traditional use cases as its inbox do. https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/19/facebook-messenger-game-ads-in-app-purchases/

Hey BotCube community, We officially launched Storyline on Product Hunt. Storyline makes it easy for non-tech people to create, test, and publish complex voice applications in minutes, using templates and visual mind-map interface. There’s no need to code anything or setup servers. It’s like a Squarespace for voice apps. Please go here and check it out: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/storyline-7 If you upvote or comment on our Product Hunt page with feedback, we’ll toss you a golden ticket to Storyline tomorrow 😉 Thank you for all the support!

If you’re asking a user to engage in a conversation instead of tapping a button or two, are you really making things any easier? “Conversational UIs might mirror the way we naturally like to communicate, but they actually required more mental load than traditional GUIs.” Really good stuff from Intercom. When they were building their live chat for sales, rather than relying on text alone they incorporated conversational UI along with one of the least fashionable interfaces – a form. Here’s a summary of insights they learned building this hybrid interface 📖 Fantastic read. https://blog.intercom.com/why-forms-arent-dead-yet/

Hey guys, let’s talk about native chatbots today. A native chatbot is a chatbot that works in either Website or Mobile App environment where the bot owner has full control over the user experience of the entire customer journey. Why does anyone want to create a native chatbot if there are Facebook/Viber/Telegram and others? There are a lot of reasons, to be honest, from the ability to customize User Experience to different privacy issues. Here is a great article from Jiaqi Pan, CEO of Landbot, about that. I highly encourage you to read it, helps to understand that chatbot is not tied to Facebook Messenger or Viber and also highlights different use cases of native chatbots from such guys as Duolingo and Intercom. https://chatbotsmagazine.com/the-rise-of-native-chatbot-development-658342167856

I think a lot of you guys remember Surebot - bot that allows you to find the most Instagrammed food and drink spots around you. It has been featured a couple of times here and even been a "Bot of the Week once. Yesterday Juraj Pal, founder of Surebot, has announced that they’ve decided to shut it down. Long story short - “our growth wasn’t what we anticipated and not enough people are actively using Sure to validate it. We did not manage to secure further investment and reached the end of our runway.” Juraj has also shared a couple of learning from this 1.5 year journey in a Medium article below. It’s sad to hear such announcements but they need to happen to help industry grow and mature. Good bye, Surebot, we’re excited for what’s next 🚀 https://medium.com/@jurajpal/were-sure-that-we-re-no-longer-sure-58af9d67c42

Amazon Alexa can now recognize different voices The battle of the smart speakers has become a constant back and forth between Amazon and Google. Back in April, Google Home gained the ability to recognize individual voices, which allows the device to personalize its response for everyone in your house or apartment. Today, Amazon announced that Alexa can now do the same thing. You can set up voice recognition using the Echo, Echo Dot, or Echo Show. Users are asked to read aloud 10 phrases, and Alexa will then use that data to create a voice profile. After that’s done, voice profiles work across other Echo devices and “most” third-party party Alexa-enabled devices. Guys, I’m really excited about this 🔥 https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/11/16460120/amazon-echo-multi-user-voice-new-feature

Api.ai is now Dialogflow! More than that, they released 2 hot new features: 1. In-line code editor: you can now write fulfillment logic, test, and implement a functional webhook directly in the console. 2. Multi-lingual agent support: building for multiple languages is now easier than ever. You can now add additional languages and locales to your new or existing agent. Excited to test! https://blog.dialogflow.com/post/apiai-new-name-dialogflow-new-features/