BotCube

We have a very special bot for today’s #botoftheweek nomination. It is made by a 14-year old kid. Yep. His name is Alec by the way. It’s a Facebook Messenger bot that keeps track of your homework. Alec was tired of trying to remember to write down his homework or enter it in a task app, so he wanted someone to keep track of it all for him. So, he created a Christopher Bot. Christopher Bot asks you what homework you were assigned at the end of every class. Then at the end of the day, he texts you a list of all the homework from your day (and displays it on a webpage for the entire week). He texts you Monday to Friday at whatever time your classes end. He can send you a list of commands. He pauses when you're on vacation, and then he resumes when you get back. It’s super awesome that nowadays more and more kids start coding early and as a result launch great products. Basically, when I was 14, my main activity was to chase that dog in a street or to climb to the top of that tree to throw apples into my neighbour’s yard 😫 Check the bot here:https://goo.gl/jIMbnc

Will you take an ads-supported Google Home/Amazon Echo for free?

When we use Google to search for a movie to watch or for a product to buy we are presented with a whole bunch of ads. And it seems normal to us. But when we ask Amazon Alexa of Google Home to search the same thing for you, no such ads exist. Yet. And it’s a great opportunity and a big challenge for advertisers at the same time. Because ads on these devices can’t be such dumb and straightforward as we see across the web. Your personal home assistant knows much more about you than your browser does. So, it must offer much more native and smart ads. And it already can. There is a plenty of use cases: knowing that it’s raining in the morning, perhaps it will offer to call you an Uber; 30 minutes before the Super Bowl starts, it may play an ad for Budweiser; when you ask when a movie is playing, it will not only tell you the time, but also offer a discount from the closest theater on the next showing. As for me, I think that in future manufacturers of voice-enabled devices such as Amazon and Google will start to offer ad-supported versions of Echo and Home for free. A premium, ad-free version would certainly be possible. It’s pretty similar to the monetization model of big China brand LeEco which sells TVs with 90% discount but gains revenue from included TV services subscriptions and ads. What do you think about future of voice assistants? I’m always ready to discuss with you in our public chat. https://goo.gl/nxrglk

Seattle-based company ReplyYes announced a $6.5 million round of funding focused on building a platform for mobile commerce via messaging services. Previously they were selling vinyl records through messengers and now they are going to expand because they keep seeing “a lot of interest” from lifestyle brands, tickets and events, apps/games, and some categories of consumables. The company has enabled commerce over Facebook Messenger and SMS right now, and will be looking to enable more platforms in the future. Payment is built into the platform, as is shipping. https://goo.gl/haoqRu

Do you remember my post about decision trees vs web views? But what if there’s a much better way? Here is a concept of building conversational experience called Random Access Navigation. It’s main idea to give people the ability to navigate without a defined path, while also being able to change their mind at any time. R.A.N. offers more than one solution for the most common bot criticism: fixed decision trees (everybody hates them). Very interesting concept for bot builders. Article: https://goo.gl/J7aRyp Decision trees vs web views

It’s always been obvious for most of people that robots will take over different routine tasks of our daily lives, freeing us to work on more creative stuff. But, surprisingly, some of the easiest tasks to automate turn out to be creative ones (art, science/research, legal, policing/security) and many of the monotonous jobs we’d really like to automate are proving very tricky (cleaning, clothing, farming). Have you ever been thinking about this? https://goo.gl/a6Tltr

Have you even been dreaming about your chatbot getting featured on Facebook? It could be a total disaster if you’re not prepared! Here is an article from team behind Nerdify bot about their experience in being featured which costed them a couple of sleepless nights :) https://goo.gl/uJgNcR Have your bot ever been featured? Tell us here.

Long read about AI today (it's not new, but worth sharing): Apple gave Steven Levy an inside look at some of its deep learning and artificial intelligence work. Apple is said to have many people working on AI across various company initiatives. Of course much of the work is highly secretive, but some of it is already reflected in current iOS features—and not just Siri. If you're not available to read it today, just add to the Pocket to come back to it later at weekend ;) https://goo.gl/75agTq

When designing a product for the web or mobile world, we usually operate within certain types of interactions and user interface elements — text fields, forms, buttons, checkboxes, or switches, for example. In the chatbot world, the interface elements are different. I found a very interesting article, especially for bot novices, about all Facebook chatbot interactions. It has a very comprehensive and huge pdf with a visual summary of all the interaction elements that are now available for the Facebook Messenger bot. It’ll save you at least a couple of hours. Article: https://goo.gl/G1MYQ2 Link to the pdf directly: https://goo.gl/GlngeY

Channel photo updated

News from the messengers side: Amazon unveils Chime, looks to reinvent the conference call with new Skype and GoToMeeting competitor. Pricing starts at $2.50 per user per month on the lowest end, with a higher tier plan of $15 per user which includes video and screen-sharing among other features. There is a basic option available for free but that is limited to video calls and chat rooms between two users. Maxim keeps fingers crossed while dreaming about death of Skype 🙏🏻 https://goo.gl/GFGGwS

While working on our last bot, we were kinda surprised that users don’t always click buttons when they see buttons, don’t always respond in text when they see a question, but they tend to interact more with visual content like stickers, images, gifs etc. Here is an interesting from Dashbot, they’ve processed almost 700 million messages through their platform and analyzed them to find a percentage of text, images, stickers and other types of messages. They’ve also processed all the images through the Amazon’s Rekognition API to find out what was pictured on them. Very interesting statistics to look through. https://goo.gl/A4Vc32