BotCube

Hey folks, I think that one way connection with you is too boring, because I don’t get feedback from you, so I decided to create a public chat where we can discuss a huge amount of bot stuff, like messaging apps, conversational interfaces, AI, ML and much more! Chat language is English, so feel free to join and share it with your friends if they are interested in bots! https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAEIJ70FNIceDnr0WIg - JOIN HERE https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAEIJ70FNIceDnr0WIg - JOIN HERE https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAEIJ70FNIceDnr0WIg - JOIN HERE Chat cover photo

It’s Sunday evening here, so it’s time for #botoftheweek nomination. This week I’ve found an interesting bot that can tell you a name of a plant. Just take a photo of any plant and send it to the bot, it will identify the plant for you in just one second. It is backed by a customized deep learning algorithm with tons of data and tuning for plants. And I can say it’s pretty accurate. Screenshot: https://goo.gl/vyhnRM Bot is here to check: https://goo.gl/uAhKVx

Chris Messina (inventor of the hashtag, Lead Developer Experience at Uber) and Amir Shevat (Head of Developer Relations at Slack) are the two the most powerful influencers in the space of bots I suppose. And it’s always interesting to hear their thoughts and listen to their discussions about future of bots. And if you’re tired of reading, here is a recent podcast with Chris Messina where they discuss MessinaBot and personal bots, "bot skeuomorphism", the role of Product Hunt in the bot ecosystem, and a bunch of other topics. I’ve also attached the file with the podcast in the message below to listen directly in Telegram. Happy listening :) https://goo.gl/54SPXU

If you’ve ever been building a bot, you must have thought about ways to generate revenue from it. Here is a great article from Amir Shevat @ Slack about different revenue models for chatbots. Actually, there are a lot of them: 1. Subscription model (Statsbot) 2. Ad serving (works not for all platforms, Slack doesn’t allow) 3. In-content ads (instant articles from Facebook) 4. Data analytics and market research (Swelly has a loooot of data about user choices) 5. Selling goods and services (Amazon Alexa to order products for kitchen by “Alexa, add to shopping list”) 6. Referral fees (different shopping assistants) 7. Brand promotion (H&M, Zara, BMW) 8. In-bot virtual goods (virtual coins in games) And many more in the article below. I hope it will help you choose the monetization model. https://goo.gl/GDvKWl

America new President really likes to use Twitter. He uses it to express strong opinions about all sorts of things. Occasionally, those opinions are targeted at publicly traded companies. After Trump negative tweets about some company their stock price abruptly drops. So, one guy decided to write a bot that constantly monitors Trump’s feed and analyzes each tweet for mentions of publicly traded companies. So, after that you can immediately trade the affected stocks based on the detected sentiment: buy if positive and short if negative. Sounds like a big piece of fun, right? Article about the experiment: https://goo.gl/LDa6a8 Also bot posts tweets out a summary each time it springs into action here on Twitter: https://goo.gl/J8ol7H And even more - the bot is completely open source and available on Github: https://goo.gl/8kze2U

Few days ago the Russian Orthodox Churchreleased a new social network build on top of Telegram. In this dedicated social network users can join the official channels of over 16 000 churches as well as connect to people within the same church. They can receive news, Bible readings and organise volunteer help. Within the social network users can also use different chatbots available on Telegram. For example a chatbot which searches for a nearest pharmacy ect. You can try the Telegram Social Network yourself here (available in 8 languages) I think that Paypal integration to receive donations from volunteers will look interesting here: /Paypal send @priest_michael 200 rubles for Tuesday’s candle

Will the voice be the dominant chatbot interface in 5 years?

I really like Intercom and here is an article from them about the future of chatbots with explanations why voice will be the dominant chatbot interface. 2016 showed us that texting chatbots is hard and takes time and effort. That’s why a lot of people right now tend to think that voice interface is a solution. But I think they are wrong. Good conversational design is a solution. As for me, I don’t see the voice to be the dominant chatbot interface, I think there’ll be more of a combination. While it’s super convenient to order a pizza with voice commands while driving a car, there are a plenty of situations when you don’t want to say something aloud. I’ve shared a poll below to ask your opinion about this point, thanks for voting! https://goo.gl/50cnEp

PayPal today launched its first bot for users of team messaging app Slack. The bot lets people send peer-to-peer (P2P) payments with the shortcode /paypal and a user’s Slack handle. Basically you can say in a chat: /Paypal send @lauren $6 for Tuesday’s Latte. Confirm transaction via tapping button on the webview and that’s it. This is PayPal’s first bot but not its first venture into the emerging chatbot ecosystem. Last November, PayPal joined Square Cash and Venmo to allow P2P payments with Siri. Weeks earlier, PayPal and Stripe joined a Facebook Messenger beta program to accept payments through the platform. Demo video Announcement

I think that one of the best and simplest bot cases right now is gathering user attitude and thoughts about some news/events. And Washington Post media agree with me on that. They’ve build a simple Facebook Messenger bot called Feels to track people’s feelings about the USA President election. Bot messages you every day and asks a simple question: “How is the election making you feel today?”. You need to respond with one emoji from the predefined set - (😄🙂😐😢😠). And that’s it. Sounds like useless/boring stuff? A full 85% of users stayed subscribed throughout the entire experiment, aha. In the early days users reported feeling mostly 😐, for a wide variety of different reasons. But emotions change around some significant points in the race. This gif shows how reactions to the election changed on key dates Article about the experiment

When we’ve been working on our “bots for celebrities” product called Virtz, our users were in love with it, the average session was quite long (7 minutes), but we faced one big issue - users were trying it once or twice, and then forgetting about it. We did try to implement different retention features like ability to subscribe to notification about celebrity new Instagram post or Youtube video, but people were furious when we sent them messages and blocked our bot. So, we definitely made a huge mistake in conversation design and fucked up our retention rate. The article below is a similar story (but with the happy-end) from the team behind Meekan, a Slack bot for scheduling. There you can find out their steps to get from 0.5% to 60% retention rate. https://goo.gl/ZEiaaq