BotCube

Hey Telegram folks, Today’s #botoftheweek shows a great example of solving a very clear problem via messenger interface. Lenny is a bot that helps you to learn 10 new English words every day in order to increase your vocabulary. It has been launched only 2 months ago but already has about 3k daily active users and 36 paid ones. Sound interesting, right? Read the full review here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Nl5p5TaqgjTd8uNQwhqiUsiyETg6v77KFfTK9WPI1yk/edit

Still missing the Alexa opportunity? Here’s one more bullet to push you forward. Amazon today announced the launch of the first Alexa skills made especially for kids, with skills from Sesame Street, SpongeBob SquarePants, and others. I just checked the skills on my Echo dot and they look phenomenal. The stories are designed specifically for kids, with the voice of actual characters (like SpongeBob). They are engaging, fun, and easy to play. By the way, the Alexa Skills Store now has more than 18,000 skills made by Amazon, businesses, and third-party developers. What are you waiting for? https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/31/sesame-street-and-spongebob-among-first-alexa-skills-for-kids/

Our awesome-bots repo passed 850 stars today! That’s fucken huge. Half a year ago, when @maximabramchuk created it, we couldn’t even think of so many people using it every day. Now it’s literally the place for bot makers to learn, share, and grow together. There’s so much info there, starting from newsletters and podcasts to tools, platforms, and guides. For the last 12 days we had 1,654 views and 815 unique visitors browsing this gem. That’s the power of open source. Thank you so much for your support!! https://github.com/BotCube/awesome-bots

Remember I told you I will share my insights from the Chatbot Summit? It's time for the very first one. During the conference, I met Adrian Zumbrunnen, who is a UX designer, writer, and speaker, currently working on conversational interfaces @ Google. We had a great chat after his talk and Adrian shared his experience of building conversational user interfaces with me. Earlier this year, he made his website conversational. The feedback, responses, and media coverage have been absolutely amazing. He received over 300 emails within the first 24 hours. He collected all his insights in one article and I HIGHLY recommend you to read it. https://uxdesign.cc/my-website-is-now-conversational-here-is-what-i-learned-7e943cc6ace0

“Cortana, Open Alexa”, Amazon says. And Microsoft agrees. Amazon and Microsoft announced something of a curveball this morning as they released plans to integrate Alexa and Cortana, their respective voice-activated digital assistants. Later this year, consumers will be able to request Cortana support through Alexa-powered devices, such as Amazon’s range of Echo smart speakers, while those using a Cortana-enabled device will be able to beckon Alexa. To activate Alexa through Cortana, you would say: “Hey Cortana, open Alexa,” and vice versa when using an Alexa-powered device, such as an Amazon Echo. Then you could, for example, order groceries through Amazon from your Windows 10 PC, or activate Cortana on your Echo to find out when your next meeting is from your Outlook calendar. By pooling their resources, the duo could go some way toward elevating their collective AI smarts over that of rivals. Your move, Apple and Google. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/technology/amazon-alexa-microsoft-cortana.html

Hey folks, I’m a little bit late, but #botoftheweek is here! Today’s bot works on Slack and helps you as a business owner to set goals, track performance and reward excellence. The name is pretty straight-forward by the way, it’s called KarmaBot. It has a plenty of features to boost your company performance and improve culture, such as setting monthly monetary bonuses based on Karma points, encouraging team members to share some Karma between each other, giving extra points to the teams for faster shipping and much more. My favorite feature here is an ability to share some karma points with my team members to reward them for doing a great job. It really works, and feels great too. I really advise you try it: http://karmabot.chat

We are moving closer to bots on WhatsApp WhatsApp is beginning to verify business accounts with a green badge next to the user’s phone number. “If you see a green badge next to a contact’s name, it means that WhatsApp has confirmed that the phone number of this contact belongs to a business account”. Conversations with businesses will also be distinguished from others because all business messages will come in yellow. It doesn’t look like a really big deal, but it appears to be one of the first signs of WhatsApp’s effort to connect businesses with customers. Since WhatsApp is insanely popular in a big number of countries, that will open up a plenty of opportunities for bot builders. These guys are reportedly testing the platform since the beginning of the year, so let’s hope they’ll finally release something soon 🙌 https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/29/whatsapp-is-verifying-business-accounts/

Do you want to know which Speech Recognition API is the fastest one? Here is a great article that presents benchmarking results for three speech to text providers: 1. Google Cloud Speech API 2. IBM Watson 3. Microsoft Speech Bing API According to the results, Google Cloud Speech seems to be the better solution as they have the most accurate and consistent results, but it is the most expensive. IBM Watson suffers a big drop in performance when working with French speech. Moreover, the response time is way too high for real-time usage. Microsoft is in the middle with a good response time. If you want to learn more, here is the article with comprehensive description: https://chatbotsmagazine.com/you-shall-not-speak-benchmarking-famous-speech-recognition-apis-for-chatbots-1c04e8ce2c66

We need your help! 🙌 We’re working on a product for conversational design and I know there are a lot people here who designed/prototyped bots and conversational interfaces. If you’re one of those people - please fill in the Typeform I attached below, it won’t take more than 10 minutes, but will be insanely helpful for us. P.S. Every bot designer who passes the survey will get an early access to our conversational design tool. If you have any questions or suggestions - feel free to ask me (@maximabramchuk). Thank you! https://maximabramchuk.typeform.com/to/OqqEwp

Just found a great video for you guys. Here Amir Shevat, the head of developer relations @ Slack, is talking about bot anatomy. He covered some interesting details of the Slack platform, bot users, conversational design, and shared his own tips & tricks for designing bots. “When you are writing an onboarding for your bot, think about it as an onboarding of a new employee to the team. How do you onboard them? Use the same paradigm, the same way of thinking to onboard a bot.” Have a great weekend! 🤖 https://youtu.be/8zBSJg62hRI