BotCube

Funny (or frightening) piece of news on Monday, guys! During Super Bowl game, Google’s ad for the Google Home aired on millions of TVs: loving families at home meeting, hugging, and being welcomed by the Google Assistant. Someone says “Okay, Google,” and that’s one has triggered a whole bunch of Google Assistants all over the United States. This isn’t the first time television has set off people’s home assistants. A month ago, a TV broadcast accidentally triggered a whole bunch of Amazon Echos. At some point, some enterprising TV writer or ad jerk is gonna plant an “Okay, Google” on TV with intent and force everyone to listen to the music he wants or to buy something on Amazon. This is a massive troll waiting to happen. https://goo.gl/wiiZs6

Great news guys, top 1 pizza brand Domino’s continues its expansion and launches their ordering bot called Dom right before the Super Bowl. Actually I was pretty surprised when I read that previously company launched a bunch of bots on a plenty of other platforms like Twitter, Apple TV, Google Home, Amazon Echo, Samsung smart TVs, watches etc. There is, however, a big caveat – if you’re placing a delivery order via Dom, you have to pay in cash. C’mon, cash? No one uses that anymore! Especially not the sort of early adopter crowd that would think ordering via chatbot is cool. The pizza chain said that Messenger payments is something it’s looking into for the future, though. And again, for us it’s a good piece of news which shows a constantly growing interest of top brands to its audience in messengers. https://goo.gl/O9WCAa

Today I want to share with you one more book called “Bot Business 101: How to start, run & grow your Bot / AI business”. I’ve started reading it a couple of days ago and found it pretty interesting. It’s written by the CEO of Botego, company which have been building conversational interfaces/bots since 2007 (wow). There are a lot of interesting topics for all the people related to bots (business owners, developers, marketers etc.): pricing bots, finding an idea, increasing retention, direct contact with brands, after-sales support and many more. It’s not so huge, so can be easily read in one happy Saturday evening ;) #books Amazon Kindle version: https://goo.gl/90QRUS Direct link (DOCX): https://goo.gl/o6uIZR

An excellent post from Mikhail Larionov (Facebook Messenger Team) supporting the use of webviews in Facebook bots. In the mind of a normal user chatbot is always a thing you interact with natural language. But bots are not about NL anymore. Webviews will play an important role in the future of bots. Every day we are getting closer and closer to bots being lightweight mobile apps. Worth reading. https://goo.gl/8UrSZC

Starbucks is embracing the trend towards voice-based computing with the launch of a new feature in its mobile app called My Starbucks barista, which allows customers to order and pay for their food and drinks just by speaking or typing. It’s great that one more top 1 brand is starting to adopt chat/voice bots into their ecosystem. Our future life will be sooo interesting ;) https://goo.gl/VmXDQc

Wow, TechCrunch is one of the first big brands to use Native Payments inside Facebook Messenger. The feature was added recently for the Crunchies Award event. Basically you can select a ticket type, then buy it directly inside Messenger using your credit card and then you'll receive a QR code which will be your pass ticket to the event. Awesome! Personally I’m glad that big brands are starting to understand how to build a great user experience inside a chatbot. Hope we’ll see more of this later in 2017. https://goo.gl/eojGHs

#tutorial If anyone of you was ever wondering how to create a neural-network based chatbot, this post is for you, guys. A month ago I found this video and thought: "Aha, another shitty Tensorflow tutorial is here". But it's not shitty, it's almost perfect! Siraj shows how to create smart bots in Python using Tensorflow, which is an open-source framework from Google. He explains all complex stuff in simple images, shows the coding process and gives you understanding of neural nets, models, machine learning and Tensorflow in minutes. 100% worth watching. https://goo.gl/qAmBNY

#botoftheweek This week was quite good for bot space and we saw a lot of bots coming to the top of PH. But one of them was especially good, also as the team behind the bot. I'm talking about Swell. Think of it as an Instagram for A/B questions. You choose 2 photos, upload them to the bot, add a caption and share it with the Swell community. The best moment of it is that you get the first votes within 30 seconds. This week the team behind Swell introduced a really new experience: they managed to copy all features from their native iOS app to a chatbot in Facebook Messenger, using HTML5 webviews. Now with the help of webviews you can see user profiles, choose notifications settings and manage your followers. And this is extremely cool experience! I've already posted an article about that, you can read more here: https://goo.gl/bXFJCA And here is a direct link to the bot: https://m.me/swell.bot. Happy botting!

Since it’s a Sunday today and you had a week to read the first part, I have a second part of the series called “Machine Learning for Dummies“ which allows you to start learning and practicing ML easily using JavaScript. This article explains the inner architecture of Neural Networks and implements an example Feed Forward NN to demonstrate how neurons connect and interact. https://goo.gl/M7tKGS Link to the first article: https://t.me/botcube/12

As you already know last week Slack released a cool feature called Threads. Basic idea is that you can reply to any message in a separate thread. It helps to create more structured discussions not to make your channel a mess of messages related to different topics. And here is the article from Amir Shevat (head of developer relations at Slack) why it’s important for bots and how can we build better bots with threads. http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/26/building-better-bots-with-threads/

Facebook testing News Feed-like ads inside Messenger. It’s not really irritating right now, because the ads is shown only under the “Contacts” feed and launched for a small test in a couple of countries, but it shows Facebook’s intentions to bring businesses directly to Messenger where they customers are. We’ll see how will it be connected to the bot platform, whether they’ll allow bots to natively send ads to users. Maybe it’ll be the first official way of monetizing bots by the way :) https://thenextweb.com/facebook/2017/01/25/facebook-testing-news-feed-like-ads-inside-messenger/

Great interview with Chris Messina, inventor of the hashtag. “Are chatbots going mainstream in 2017? As designers, what are some of the challenges of designing conversational experiences?” Chris answered a lot of questions and shared interesting thoughts about the future of conversational interfaces. The main idea: “bots won’t go mainstream in 2017”. But they definitely will, later. And it’s our goal as bot developers to pay more attention to designing conversational interfaces than to development itself to make this process faster. https://goo.gl/R7yBwA