🌟 Today's #botoftheweek is kinda big. Philips Lighting launches their chatbot.

🤖 » TEST THE BOT HERE

2017 is the year when big players are starting on chatbots. And guess what?

Philips Lighting claims to be the first lighting solutions company to announce the launch of a chatbot! This is huge.

Basically it's a simple, menu-based bot that shows their products & recommendations and allows users to make a purchase directly. Let's dive right in!

❤️ Goods:

1. Bot flow & general entry point for product search

If you're in e-commerce, you have a lot of stuff to show. And unlike on eBay, you can't send endless messages to your users. Kindly ask them what they wants to find and assist all the way through.

💩 Bads:

1. DO NOT ASK EMAIL IN CHATBOTS

Simple as that. Messenger is an intimate zone, and you're trying to move users from your product to email? That's bad.

2. Support simple conversations, like "who are you"

Without that, your product is vulnerable. Users'd love to chit-chat a little bit, and will try to brake your bot. And if you cannot support even obvious messages, than what're you doing in bots?

3. Make a personality, not a heartless assistant

At first design a character. Than map all your content & features on that character. No one wants to buy from a robot. Pretty much it.

⌚️ 2 min read (kinda short)

http://www.theedgemarkets.com/article/philips-lighting-launches-chatbot-service-facebook-singapore

Want to know how to improve your chatbot with 3 simple steps?? 🤔

Most chatbots suck at user experience.

And it has nothing to do with your industry or the purpose of the bot. It's because of a few key elements you miss.

People want to chat but not fill a form.

Here are some advices that will help you to make your bot chatty without doing too much work ❤️

⌚️ 5 min read (good one)

https://medium.com/@assafelovic/how-to-improve-your-chatbot-in-3-simple-steps-36f9d26d7f2f

Tech firms are turning towards conversational AI bots for their messaging apps 🤑

Catchy noscript? Yes.

Is it true? YES! It's happening.

We already have a ton of great products in bots and it’s never too late to check them to understand what they did right & wrong.


https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chatbot-list-2017

Actually, I’m going to launch a new private series on that, improving our #botoftheweek section. If you’re interested, shoot me a message and I’ll add you to the list.

⌚️ 8 min read (long one)

Ready to build a Messenger Game for 1.2 BILLION PEOPLE?? 😍

Facebook recently announced that it is rolling out Instant Games to the whole Messenger audience.

Do you smell this new opportunity??

You can now build a Messenger game with rich gameplay features like turns, leaderboards & tournaments. And of course, game bots help players to stay engaged by sharing their results with friends and providing useful updates.

I personally think this is a great opportunity for developers, just like old good App Store, but with new mechanics.

Are you in?

⌚️ 3 min read (short one)

https://venturebeat.com/2017/05/02/facebook-rolls-out-instant-games-on-messenger-to-1-2-billion-people/

Have you ever wondered how to make $50,000 with a bot?? 💰

Todays #botoftheweek is a great example how to do that.

Simply say, WorthMore is a platform for product discovery. Sounds kinda usual, right?

But these guys are different.

You are given two separate products and then left to determine which is priced higher. Simple quiz with GIFs that shows ticking counter. Pretty much it.

The main advantage is how these guys use GIFs and game mechanics to create engagement.


And guess what??

In the first version Amazon accounted for over $50,000 in purchases from the affiliate links of the products that were provided after the game.

$50,000!!! That's insane.


These guys decided to partner with Amazon and soon will be rolling out games based on a user’s shopping preferences so the experience seems more personal. Great product. Love it!

⌚️ 2 min read (really short)

🤖 » TEST THE BOT HERE

https://medium.com/@kemardarlington/worthmore-2-0-ca6d8c6ca35a

🤖 Pullstring & Skype has launched the new Doctor Who Bot!

Skype bots are becoming more & more popular and big brands are starting to bet on them too. And here's the proof.

One of the most popular British television series Doctor Who teamed up with PullString to launch a main character as a bot on Skype!

How cool is that!?

⌚️ 2 min read (again)

https://blogs.skype.com/news/2017/05/03/take-on-the-quest-to-save-the-universe-with-the-new-doctor-who-bot/

Can bots really help you dress better? With new Echo Look, definitely yes!! 😱

For many people, getting dressed is a stressful and confusing time-suck.

The concept — make getting dressed easier with the help of a digital authority — isn’t new. The first one was created in 1995.

And there's a place for more, because last week Amazon announced their "style assistant" — Echo Look. It’s basically an Echo combined with a hands-free camera controlled by your voice.

So now there's new opportunity to build a skill for Alexa that may help thousands of people to look better every day. Go do it! 💪

⌚️ 7 min read (long one)

https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/3/15522792/amazon-echo-look-alexa-style-assistant-ai-fashion

Don’t Miss A New Opportunity to Build Bots For Bing


It appears that bots will soon be integrated into Bing search results. This news will likely be announced next week at the Build conference.

Verification can be found in the Build schedule, which includes a session noscriptd “Chatbots on Bing.com”. The session invites developers to “learn how chatbots enhance the Bing experience and how you can add your custom bots to Bing.com”.

It means that you can start building bots on top of the super big search engine very soon. That’s very solid.

Keep an eye on this, I’ll keep you updated.

⌚ 3 min read (kinda short)

https://venturebeat.com/2017/05/04/microsoft-is-bringing-bots-to-bing-search-results/

🌟 Microsoft announced HUUUGE updates to their Bot Framework!

A lot of new opportunities are now open for bot developers.

In short, they've added payments, website integration (superb cool!), and improved discovery (you can publish your bots on Cortana, Bing and Skype for Business). That's awesome.

The Bot Framework is now used by more than 130,000 developers. And I'm 100% sure this new update will rapidly increase this number.

⌚️ 8 min read (kinda long, but super important)

https://blog.botframework.com/2017/05/10/Build/

🚀 Boost your Chatfuel bot with advanced analytics!

If you do not use analytics in your bots, I highly recommend you to do that.

It will help you to save a lot of time and money to check which features are useful for your users, and which are not.

And if you’re building bots on Chatfuel, now it’s super easy to integrate analytics into your bot! That’s a big move for Chatfuel & Botanalytics, saving tons of time for their users, which tried a lot of ways to do that in code.

⌚️ 3 min read (announcement)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/chatfuel-and-botanalytics-integrate-to-bring-advanced-analytics-to-chatbots-17d176062896

P.S. if you’re not on Chatfuel, here’s a list of all analytics for bots, choose one and enjoy!

🤔 Thinking about building a travel bot? Read this first.

Travel market is a great opportunity for bot developers and there’re already a lot of good players there.

So I highly recommend you to learn their experience before going into that. It'll help you to avoid mistakes they made and choose really useful features for your bots.

How to find them? Here's an article for you.

⌚️ 6 min read (not close enough to dive into the topic)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/are-social-chatbots-the-future-of-hassle-free-travel-e043c7feea93

💊 Bots in medicine? That's a big market and today's #botoftheweek proves that.

If you want to use medical cannabis, it’s hard to find a professional who can advise you which strain to use, how to take and in what dosage.

And that's a real problem.

Guys from Bakas built a chatbot for that! It answers general questions like ‘what kind of cannabis do I need to treat anxiety?' and provides user with useful information on how to use cannabis medicine.

Numbers? Since launch on April 20, the bot has provided more than 5,000 recommendations to users!! That's huge.

Good idea, great market, right execution. Pretty much it.

⌚️ 3 min read (short one)

Chat with the bot - https://m.me/ABBIhealthbot/

Read the article - http://www.kgw.com/news/local/marijuana/tigard-doctors-educating-medical-cannabis-users-through-chatbot/439417370

API.AI “Small Talk” is now Open! Why is it a Really Big Deal?

Here at BotCube we’ve built a lot of bots during the last year using both api.ai and wit.ai as NLP providers. Most of the time we’ve been choosing api.ai because of one reason — module called “Small Talk”. It allows you to easily import a lot of predefined answers for simple questions and phrases like “Hi!“, “How are you?“, “Are you robot?“, “What’s your hobby?“, “How old are you?” and many-many more (about one hundred actually).

A week ago guys from api.ai made their Small Talk NLP module open and in this article our I’m going to tell you why it’s a really big deal for all the bot builders. The article was also just featured on Chatbots Magazine.

⌚️ 6 min read (kinda long, but totally worth it)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/api-ai-small-talk-is-now-open-source-why-is-it-a-big-deal-a39c54f89d85

Amazon is exploring new ways to reward their developers

They have quietly launched a new program that will directly pay skill developers building high-quality Alexa skills. Today, however, Amazon is selecting skills from those voice apps categorized in the “Games, Trivia, & Accessories” category only.

As more developers join the program and find out how much they’re earning, it will be easier to figure out what sort of scale Amazon is using to determine its payouts.

The program begins this month, and developers will be alerted by an email from the Alexa team if their skill qualifies for inclusion.

⌚️ 3 min read (short one)

https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/16/amazon-begins-rewarding-top-performing-alexa-skill-developers-with-direct-payments/

P.S. If you're looking for different ways to monetize your bot, take a look at the Monetization section here.

Google is Launching a New Service to Fix Chatbots

TechCrunch has learned that Google has developed a new service called Chatbase, which provides analytics and suggestions for how to “fix” bot experiences to make them better for users.

With Chatbase, Google is moving on a couple of themes. First of all, it is tapping into one of the biggest recent developments in the world of messaging apps: chatbots, or automatic response systems that sit on top of existing messaging platforms like Slack and Facebook’s Messenger. These tap into innovations in areas like natural language processing and machine learning to provide information and much more to users in a chat messaging format — a new way for users to interact with organizations and apps.

In short, Google is filling a gap: Chatbots need fixing.

⌚️4 mins read (kinda short)

https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/17/google-chatbase-chatbot-analytics/

🚕 Take on Whatsapp bots by following BMW example!

Big brands are becoming more & more interested in chatbots. And now BMW turns in too!

They decided to allow interested parties to follow the latest news in the DTM championship with the bot.

Simply say, it lets people learn more about BMW’s car for the 2017 season of DTM, along with the history of the brand in the sport.

⌚ 2 min read(really short)

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/bmw-introduces-whatsapp-chatbot-for-dtm-activity-and-results-it-s-easy-to-use-117424.html

Payments are here!! 😍

https://telegram.org/blog/payments

More updates from Telegram. Love that!

For dessert, we've made Instant Views into a platform. And now we're launching a $200,000 crowdsourcing competition. Join us in our quest to make the entire internet available in the Instant View format.

Also, don't forget to check out the new settings: different styles and fonts and an auto-night mode for Instant View pages.

https://telegram.org/blog/instant-view-contest-200K

How to bring 300K+ users to your bot almost for free

Do you still think that only super complex bots with great UX and a lot of effort put into it get traction? That's not true.

Are you still sure that you need to spend thousands of dollars on advertising to bring traffic to your bot? That's not true again.

Here is the story from the founder of MojiHunt - “The Most Stupid Game for Facebook Messenger” which got 12K comments, 31K likes, 7.3K shares, 1.9M views for his super simple emoji game just for 20$.

⌚️ 3 min read (super short)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/mojihunt-chatbot-story-250k-users-and-17-million-emojis-in-1-month-13950db9e6f8

💡 Get some fresh ideas from the latest update of Skype platform!

A year ago the Skype platform was officially open up with the debut of Skype chatbots.

First impression? Mehh..

Since then, everything has changed. Now they have rich GUI, video bots, add-inns (aka chat extensions), Skype chat on every website, bot payments, discovery via Harmon Kardon Invoke, and many more.

Here's a big wrap-up from Skype about everything Microsoft announced at Build 2017 conference. Must read to understand where the market is going.

⌚️ 5 min (must read)

https://blogs.skype.com/news/2017/05/10/skype-brings-developers-and-consumers-closer-together-at-build-2017/