Telegram CEO reveals their plans on adding voice calling into the app in one of his tweets. Previously they said in April 2015 that they had developed “encrypted voice calling technology some time ago,” but never prioritized the technology. I hope it’ll work as stable and fast as the main messaging functionality.

http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/17/telegram-ceo-says-messaging-app-will-add-voice-calling/

About 2-3 years ago I was using a couple of services where you can select a language and find a foreigner to practice and master different languages. I remember how hard it is to find person available at the same timezone and willing to discuss topics you want to discuss. And today I’ve come across a review of Duolingo’s chatbot which can help you to learn desired language. Clear benefits: 24/7 available conversationalist, relevancy - it suggests you to discuss topics which are popular at the moment (USA President election for example), gamification - you can gain XP points for every correct sentence and ask help when you don’t know what to say. Right now it has some restrictions in terms of vocabulary and accepting written responses only, but I’m sure that this is the future and with AI and speech recognition technology evolving it will be a very popular way to learn a new language - talking to a bot which corrects your pronunciation and help you to form written responses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7sm33TSfUQ

Statsbot.co (top1 bot for Slack which allows you to get analytics data by asking a natural language question) lately published a story about their journey to success. They told about how they monetize Statsbot, built a business on Slack and got hired by over 20,000 teams. In the article you can find their thoughts on different business models for bots in Slack and their recommendations on using different 3rd party tools to speed up your bot development.

https://medium.com/stats-and-bots/how-statsbot-is-building-a-business-on-slack-d0d4ca1655b#.bc6yg4wmm

Facebook replaces its old inbox with the web version of Messenger. It can sound like not a big deal for you, but it really is and let me explain why. Before that Facebook had 2 versions of messaging UI: old crappy one without support of all the bot features (quick replies, location and many more) and the second one which was a Messenger UI - with support of all the features you need to get the full experience of bots. And now Facebook redirects you directly to the Messenger when you want to open your inbox. It’s a huge step to the unification of conversational experience for Facebook users and minus 100XP points of pain for all the bot developers.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/18/facebook-replaces-its-old-inbox-with-the-web-version-of-messenger/

From January 9 to January 18 more than 2500 people from 65 countries voted 5373 times for the best travel, productivity, social, e-commerce, entertainment, and news chatbots!

Meet the winners of the 1st ChatBottle Awards

1. The best Travel bot - Instalocate
2. The best Productivity bot - Meekan
3. The best Social bot - Foxsy
4. The best Entertainment bot - BFF Trump
5. The best E-Commerce bot - chatShopper
6. The best News bot - TechCrunch

And, the Editors' Choice Award goes to Swelly

https://chatbottle.co/awards/1st-chatbottle-awards-2017-winners

Angel investor and Gigster CEO Roger Dickey recently released a Pitchbot - bot which simulates a pitch meeting with an angel, incubator, seed fund or VC firm. You respond to multiple-choice questions about your product, team, growth and values as you try to impress the investor. If your answers show you know how to build a great startup, you win a mock-up funding term sheet.

So will your pitch earn you a massive valuation from the top VCs? Or do you need to go back to the drawing board? Pitchbot lets you know before you’re in an investor’s office — in the real hot seat.
http://pitchbot.vc/

Super interesting article from the author of @denissexy channel about what the world will be if we’ll have one app (Telegram in this case) for all your needs, kinda “mobile OS Telegram”, and how will it change the way we launch apps. He also shared his point of view on the very popular topic “Will the apps be replaced by chatbots?”. It's long, but definitely worth reading during the Saturday cup of morning tea :)

EN: https://goo.gl/RLD9Sc
RU: https://goo.gl/FHWJLS

Predictions about bots evolution in 2017 from the Facebook Messenger engineering team lead. Most of them are quite reasonable (less conversation/more structure because it’s harder to type than just tap, more webview experience to increase user input) and one of them made me feel curious - it says that bots will unlock better discoverability (unified place to find, rate and interact with a bot). Quite funny to hear such a “prediction” from the team behind Messenger, right? ;)

https://goo.gl/CxYdmE

Have you ever been in a situation when you want to show someone an impressive case of a chatbot but can’t come up with any cool one because most of bots are shitty? Yesterday I’ve found a massive list of high-quality bots from top brands like Uber, H&M, CNN, Domino’s Pizza, Victoria’s Secret and many-many more. Did you know before that “Zootopia” movie had its own bot? Me neither.

I spent about an hour looking through the list and learning how the world top brands use chatbots. I suggest you to do the same not to build yet another crappy bot.

http://www.topbots.com/brands/

If you’ve always wanted to get started with Machine Learning but the course from Stanford University seems to be too complicated for you, here is the first article from the series called “Machine Learning for Dummies“ which allows you to start learning and practicing easily using JavaScript. First topic in the article is the raw basics of Neural Networks, Genetic Programming and Evolution. Just don't be afraid to start :)

https://goo.gl/jril4U

#botoftheweek
Sunday is a great day to announce a new topic here! Actually, I see a lot of bots every day (this is my job, btw), but I do NOT see a lot of great bots or usecases for them on a daily basis. Most of them are just a crap. That's why every week on Sunday I will post some bots that nailed it. Today is not an exception!

SignBot is a Messenger bot for creating email signature in a few simple steps. This is a real ass pain — I tried several tools to do that and they were either too complicated or pretty expensive. This bot is easy to use, free and neat. You can check it here: https://m.me/255239914908100

This is how generated signature looks: https://goo.gl/oRMtcU

Today I want to share with you one book I’m super excited about. It’s called “Create Convincing Computer Conversations”. The company which stands behind it is pullstring.com. It’s one of the leading companies in the field of computer conversation in text, voice, and video through a combination of design and technology. Since the launch in 2011 they have raised ~45mln$ in funding and created many mindblowing bot stories. I wish I could share more details, but it’s out of my channel format. So, I highly encourage you to read the book and the article below about its idea. The book itself is super interesting, useful and not long at all (20 pages). It is also attached in the message below. #books

Article: https://goo.gl/WP0g0i
Book: https://goo.gl/hFIC2g

Great post from the team behind Swell about how they managed to copy their native iOS app with all it’s features into a chatbot within Facebook Messenger. Thanks to webviews ( HTML5 windows) it’s no longer just light-weight apps integrated in Messenger, but it gives developers a fantastic playground for creative ways to rebuild fully functional iOS and Android Apps within the Messenger.

https://goo.gl/j8knPp

By the way, they just hit 2mln users and got featured on Product Hunt today, you can find and support them here: https://www.producthunt.com/topics/bots/newest

Article containing 19 tips/best practices for building chatbots. I wish I had read it years ago and hadn’t made a lot of mistakes such as relying on messenger features which aren’t supported across all the devices, not giving a user an ability to cancel or go back to the main menu at any moment of interaction and many more common and straightforward UX mistakes. “Must read”, especially for novice bot builders, it'll save you a ton of wasted time and energy :)

https://goo.gl/3rd7fk

Messenger platform team and the founder of Octane AI (bot building platform) Matt Schlicht recently had a conversation about the future of bots. What's interesting, they don't see Messenger bots going WeChat's way: recreate all transactional experience in one huge platform. Instead of this, they see bots more conversational and personal. I think we'll see some Facebook M implementation right inside Messenger platform later this year.

"Imagine bots that can send updates to your friends for you, tell stories that change based on your reactions, give fans an inside look at what happens backstage at a concert or an awards show. That’s where we want to take bots next. We want to move beyond transactional experiences and make them conversational and personal."
https://messengerblog.com/bots/building-bots-for-messenger-tips-from-the-experts-octane-ai/

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

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/

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/

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://news.1rj.ru/str/botcube/12