BotCube

Chatbot startup NearGroup raises a 1.6Million seed round NearGroup, a chatbot allowing users to connect with like-minded people based on proximity, personality and their creative content has raised a $1.6m (£1.2m) seed round. This Messenger chatbot allows users to read the ‘stories’ of individuals nearby, and reply to people they want to start a conversation with. By showing someone’s content first, not their face, you are more likely to find something in common and avoid the “body-shopping” culture of Tinder etc. NearGroup has over 2 Million users, and has processed over 2 Billion messages to date. The current growth rate is extraordinary with 600K new-users joining every month & 20–25M messages exchanged per day. The team is targeting 100 Million users by end of December 2018 and planing to also bring nearby businesses onto the platform. https://chatbotslife.com/neargroup-raises-a-1-6million-seed-round-lead-by-openocean-on-strength-of-2-billion-messages-330947923f97

Google Assistant got a bunch of new cool features at October 4th event Google revealed a lot of products at its San Francisco event on October 4th, namely the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2XL, the Home Mini, and the Home Max. There were also software features announced for Google Assistant and Home products, but there were so many that they're hard to keep track of. So if you want to dig up that one specific Assistant feature from the event, you can find it new the article below. Spoiler: Male Voice! http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/07/new-home-assistant-related-features-google-announced-october-4th-event/

How to design a compelling personality for a chatbot? Personality is a key to a successful bot. It helps you to provide a better conversational experience, saves you when the bot doesn’t understand something and can differentiate your product from other bots with the similar service. Here are 6 things to consider when designing a personality: 1. Environment Consider whether the target environment is a work environment or a consumer environment, and what social attributes are acceptable for a personality in this environment. For example, having a personality that is very humoristic might not be the right choice for a legal assistant bot. 2. Audience Consider the type of audience who will be the primary users of your bot (hint: everyone is never the right audience type, even for Google). A bot that talks in slang might not be the right fit for a more conservative audience and a bot that uses too many three-letter acronyms might miss the mark for others, IMO. 3. Jobs to be done The task the user is intending to execute implies different personality characteristics, even for what initially might seem like similar tasks. Buying a guitar might require a totally different bot personality than buying healthcare insurance. 4. Runtime variations This is slightly more complex, as it might require some logic associated with the bot, but personality might be context-driven. It is OK to be whimsical when sending directions to a party, but less so when sending directions to a work meeting to which the user is already late. 5. Locally relevant social acceptance Some cultures are different than others. Referring to someone as “dear” might be fine in one place in the world while being culturally unacceptable in another place. 6. Existing branding Many brands feel very strongly about the personality their brand exposes. Slack, for example, wants to expose an empathetic, friendly, and pleasant personality. 7. Values At the end of the day, the bot’s personality is an extension of the service you want to expose. Think about the core values of the service, as that can imply a certain type of personality. P.S. I highly recommend everyone who wants to dive more into this topic to read Designing Bots book from Amir Shevat. It's a 🤖 bible.

Apple acquires init.ai Earlier this week, a small startup called Init.ai announced that it soon would be discontinuing its service. The team was (according to a notice on the site) “joining a project that touches the lives of countless people across the world.” They are becoming a part of the group working on Siri. To be clear, this is not a straight acquisition, but more of an acqui-hire, so Apple didn’t have a comment to offer along the lines of the one it made last week. Huge news for all the bot space 💪🏻 https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/04/apple-acqui-hired-the-team-from-messaging-assistant-init-ai-to-work-on-siri/

Google has finally released 2 new smart speakers 🔥 1. Google Home Mini It’s a smaller version of its flagship smart speaker, to compete with Amazon Echo Dot. The device will retail for $49. Home Mini will be available in the U.S. as well as United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Germany, France, and Australia. 2. Google Home Max It’s a big, premium smart speaker for $399 available in December. While the Home Mini is gonna compete with the Echo Dot and low-cost smart speakers, the Home Max will compete directly with high-end smart speakers like products from Sonos, recently unveiled Echo Plus, and Apple’s HomePod. “Max is more than 20 times more powerful than Google Home, so it will fill any room in your house with great sound”. More info about Home Mini: https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/04/google-unveils-home-mini-smart-speaker-for-49-to-challenge-amazons-echo-dot/ More info about Home Max: https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/04/google-unveils-home-max-for-399-coming-to-the-u-s-in-december/

Slack is partnering with Oracle to offer business bots Slack Technologies has secured a partnership with Oracle to integrate the tech giant's enterprise software products into the popular workplace messaging app. The partnership will allow workers to use Slack as the interface for Oracle's sales, human resources and business software. Workers will be able to ask questions such as "how many vacation days do I have left this year?" and instantaneously receive a response from an Oracle chatbot. The partnership between the two companies came about after Slack secured the tech giant as a customer. At Oracle, there are 30,000 workers who actively use Slack for work. Oracle is currently developing these chatbots, and they will begin to roll out to Slack and Oracle users within the next two quarters. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/03/slack-oracle-partnership-will-offer-new-in-app-business-bots.html

BotCube is at Alexa Dev Day in San Francisco today. Come say hi if you're there too. Would love to chat!

Hey guys, it’s time for #botoftheweek. Our bot today is kinda usual - it has no task or problem to solve. It’s a multiplayer strategy game on Telegram called Idle Town. And these guys already have more than 60k users with about 2k of them playing daily. Read my review below to find out more. Or you can test the bot here: @IdleTownBot https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-5wPfzEI-qHH6UsZEVF9XAlLc3yvha1Y8pk1XbBGXi0

Slack has released a new feature in their bot platform called Dialogs. Dialogs are new interactive modals that can capture multiple pieces of information and send them directly to your app. You can use them to build a robust form inside Slack, or simply collect a single line of text. A single dialog can accomplish what used to mean directing someone into a separate browser window, or engaging them in back-and-forth interactions within a Slack channel. You could build an app that lets people file a help desk ticket, complete a survey, manage approvals, take attendance, assign project management tasks, and much more. It’s awesome to see that Slack is not trying to rely fully on the NLP interface which is not perfect for most of the tasks 👍 https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/building-more-intricate-workflows-in-slack-with-dialogs-74f122ed887c

“Getting started with conversational design can be a bit overwhelming” It really is. When you’re starting the design you have to have a robust process in mind. Here's a great guide on that. Yogesh Moorjani divided the conversational design process into 6 simple steps: - User intents - Key user inputs - Play assistant - Design flow - The script - Bring it all together And covered all them with illustrations and detailed explanation. Read this, take notes, and bookmark it, it’ll save you time & money in the future. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iHFObs70NjiE3JjCtce2kl5DcUFAC0KwIs2mlpqk3JE/edit#heading=h.2xsrlih9mtgs

1500 members!! Thank you so much everyone 🤖🔥