💡 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/

💰 Up to $100,000 in Funding to Empower the World’s Poorest!

If you're up to build a funded chatbot, the impressive Jake Kendall is looking to fund some prototypes and build out the best for rollout.

DFS is accepting proposals through May 31 to fund chatbot development that, like the DoNotPay bot, help people from the poorest countries apply for assistance, file complaints or make appointments.

If you think you can design and deliver the equivalent of DoNotPay for more basic needs, fill out the form  by May 31st.

Hope that helps! 🙌

⌚️ 3 min read (kinda short)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/chatbot-challenge-up-to-100-000-in-funding-to-empower-the-worlds-poorest-b1f3e387d304

🕷 Marvel's Spider Man has a new bot!!

Fictional characters are becoming a hot space for bots. Humani, Barbie, Doctor Strange, Hearthstone, Doctor Who, it's really booming!

This new #botoftheweek from Marvel shares action shots from the comic book and directs you to answer questions and decipher riddles. It also asks you to share your location, so the bot can tell you where to go to “report for duty” to fight an evil army (a.k.a direct you to a local store where you can buy the comic book 😉).

👏 Great concept, good UX, nice content. 9/10.

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

👏 Improve your bot design changing a few words!

Chatbot design today is like web design in 1996. Crappy. But it's just the beginning.

We need more examples, more good cases.

Look at the image below. The bot on the right has personality, sets user expectations about its scope, and, by providing examples, clarifies what the next step is.

Curious to learn more tricks? Read the article, really helpful.

⌚️ 4 min read (good one)

https://blog.botsociety.io/chatbot-design-today-is-like-web-design-in-1996-b5d3b09794b0

The latest Google Home commercial is just hilarious 😄

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpnxTXILS4s

Want to Easily Create a FAQ Bot? Try this service from Microsoft!

Microsoft has launched a service for businesses to quickly and easily create a FAQ bot customers can chat with inside Bing search results.

What's cool here??

The simple creation of a bot based on Bing Places information provides businesses with a less technical way to enhance their online presence.


The new bots-for-businesses service is currently only available to restaurants: Bing business bot is already partnering with top restaurants.

However, Microsoft expressed an interest in bringing bots to other sectors at Build.

I hope it will be soon!

⌚ 2 min read (kinda short)

https://venturebeat.com/2017/05/22/microsoft-is-helping-restaurants-cook-up-their-own-bots/

🙌 Botanalytics partners with Motion AI!

Motion AI is one of the easiest solutions to build, train and deploy chatbots.

With the Botanalytics integration, Motion AI users can further observe the experience with information extracted from analytics metrics.

If you're a bot developer who uses Motion AI platform, it's a must for you!

⌚️ 3 min read (announcement)

https://botanalytics.co/blog/2017/05/23/motion-ai-botanalytics-partner/

Not on Motion AI? Here's a list of all platforms, choose one and enjoy!

Kik announced plans to launch a new cryptocurrency built on top of the Etherium blockchain called Kin

Once it’s up and running, each Kik user will get a Kin wallet and opportunities to earn Kin for being part of the community. The currency can be exchanged for products, goods, and services within the chat app and any others that adopt the currency.

To oversee the cryptocurrency — both its administrative core tasks and its growth — Kik also announced the creation of the Kin Foundation. Its presence will provide assurance that people can participate in a Kin economy that is not   and can never be   monopolized by a giant company.

This path leads to a future that is compelling for consumers, and open and fair for developers.

⌚️ 4 min read (good one)

https://medium.com/kinfoundation/announcing-kin-a-cryptocurrency-for-an-open-future-98f1da2f498a

Learn more about Kin - https://kin.kik.com/

🚴 Do you like cycling?

If your answer is yes, you'll like the #botoftheweek too!

Bikemap Bot searches 10 routes for cycling next to your location out of our more than 3.2M routes in 80+ countries which were uploaded by users. It helps you to find a perfect cycle route for your next ride.

The bot is still in beta but it works pretty stable, UX is super simple and content is regularly updated. Worth trying.

Bikemap Bot is available on Messenger now.

Try the bot - https://m.me/bikemap

😮 Want to know how to get a million users to your bot?

Instant Translator is a great example for you!

A very simple bot that was made only to demo bots to corporates has evolved into the biggest translation bot on Facebook. Now it has almost 1 million signed on users on Facebook and 600k monthly active users.

Not bad, really?

Here's a story behind it, including their growth, features, launch and many more.

⌚️ 4 min read (good read)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/how-instant-translator-bot-got-1-million-users-27089533df32

P.S Feel free to try it on Facebook or Viber and give feedback in our public chat

💬 Twitter is reshaping the customer experience through chatbots!

Twitter has recently launched a customizable Direct Message Card that businesses can use to promote and share bots and other customer experiences built in Direct Messages. This new card will help businesses drive discovery of such experiences both through Promoted Tweets and organic sharing.

Using a Direct Message Card, businesses can capture people's attention with engaging image or video creatives, and include up to four fully customizable call-to-action buttons. The latest development for Twitter has been introduced after the platform faces rigor competition from alternative advertising apps like Microsoft, Facebook and Google.

Seems like Twitter is going huge on chatbots in order to grow their ad revenue. But it’s a good sign for all us to start building something cool on the updated platform 😉

⌚️ 4 min read (again)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/twitter-adds-chat-bots-to-direct-messages-219e510c0cb6

🤔 Why does your bot need a personality?

Because we design for humans.

Building a rich and detailed personality makes your bot more relatable, believable, and relevant to your users.

Here’s a great article on how can you personalise bot conversations to be more life-like, intimate, and representative of human interaction. Must read.

⌚️ 11 min read (quite big, but really useful)

https://blog.prototypr.io/a-guide-to-developing-bot-personalities-c6eba213d77b

Starting today, Instagram supports a brand new type of ads — conversational ads, otherwise, Messenger bots promotion.

Now when user clicks on an Instagram messenger-specific ad, it automatically opens Messenger bot, where he gets a personalized message with content that ad manager previously included in Ads Manager interface.

Do you smell the opportunity? 😉

With this new exciting feature you can create a real conversation with end users and automate some business tasks! It’s smart, it’s focused on a specific action, and it doesn’t require humans on the other side.

The feature will be rolling out in the next few months, can’t wait to test! 😍

https://medium.com/@flreln/how-to-get-clients-from-messenger-using-new-instagram-ads-22c25d81a057

👏 11 good industries for chatbots.

Millions of people already use bots. They are using it for entertainment, shopping, scheduling and much more.

So there are nearly limitless possibilities for what can be done with chatbots. Tons of industries.

But which of them can help you to take more advantages from creating and selling your bot?

Have a look at these cool examples featured in Inc. magazine to understand what to build next!

⌚ 3 min read (kinda short)

https://www.inc.com/larry-kim/11-interesting-examples-of-how-to-use-chatbots.html

Forward-thinking organizations across financial services are already beginning to use AI to automate tedious processes.

But what are the advantages of using chatbots in financial sector?

AI chatbots with emotional intelligence can deliver spend analysis and stock advice, assist in opening or closing an account, transfer money, or resolve a credit charge dispute — decreasing costs a lot.

A real chance to improve banking business, right?

⌚️ 4 min read (good one)

https://venturebeat.com/2017/05/26/financial-services-sector-needs-ai-not-customer-service-for-dummies/

Meet #botoftheweek, your personal guide for travel Japan!

Holiday Inn Osaka Nauba launched Bebot, the first hotel-bot in Japan.

Bebot acts as a hotel concierge, provides guests with personal assistance such as booking restaurants, personalized recommendations for activities, and answering questions about hotel facilities and services.

It opens a great opportunity for hotels to improve experiences for their guests by learning about them through informal chat log and also save on personnel by automating responses to frequently asked questions in the chatbot. This way, hotels can simply focus on enabling the amazing hotel experiences.

So if you are going to visit Japan, make sure you get this bot installed, otherwise you can be rejected to checkin 😂

https://www.newswire.com/news/meet-bebot-japans-first-ai-chatbot-for-hotels-now-available-at-holiday-19590002​

There were a lot of rumors about it and yeah, it happened. Yesterday, at the annual WWDC event Apple revealed their Amazon Echo/Google Home competitor called HomePod. And yea, it’s with Siri inside 🤖

But what’s more interesting - according to the Apple CEO Tim Cook who said “We want to reinvent home music”, HomePod is more focused on music first, not Siri. The price for this thing is 349$, which is really a lot in comparison to Amazon Echo (180$) and Google Home (130$). Seems like Apple executives looked to justify that higher price by pitching the HomePod as a premium-tier speaker for music - a big focus for Apple - while implying that the Echo and Home are not.

But let’s talk voice assistants. From my perspective - Apple is doing the right thing positioning its new device as something different and premium because of 2 reasons:
1. Siri kinda sucks. A big question for the new speaker, though, is whether Siri is good enough to power its own dedicated device. Siri was around from 2011, but Apple has been slow to improve Siri's voice-recognition technology and set of responses, especially compared with Alexa and Google Assistant. A smart speaker housing an underachieving voice assistant could weaken demand.
2. Apple is late to the market. Amazon's two-year head start with its Alexa-powered Echo smart speaker has allowed it to introduce a whole range of Echo devices, partner with dozens of smart home device makers and sell millions of speakers. Google started selling its competing Google Home, powered by Google Assistant, in November.

But as we know from the experience of past decades Apple usually knows how to break patterns and conquer the market. Let the battle begin 😄

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/05/apple-announces-the-homepod/

Here's a starting framework for developing voice and tone in chatbots.

Why does it matter?

Voice and tone can help conversations seem natural. So chatbots are really depend on it. And to build a good product, you need to build a good persona first.

⌚ 8 min read (bigger than usual)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/branding-bots-part-1-crafting-voice-and-tone-for-your-chatbots-and-voice-interfaces-ac102ad51f56

Chatbots are being introduced into almost all spheres of our life. That's a bold fact.

But what do you think about using bots in education?

This field has traditionally been known as a sector where innovation moves slowly. I mean, really slowly.

Nevertheless, during the last years, there has been a large hype over innovative tools to enhance teaching and learning through educational technology.

And here're 6 great examples on how to do that using bots. For example, giving feedback on essays. Good one?

⌚️ 7 min read (educational, lol)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/six-ways-a-i-and-chatbots-are-changing-education-c22e2d319bbf

Do you want to design your bot at a high level?

It's really hard to build a good design without a proper tool. And there is one.

Meet the bot canvas. Actually, it's a spreadsheet coded with four parts: green, red, blue and yellow one. Each part provide you to answer the questions connected with value, user related, design, development and deployment parameters of your bot.

As a result, Chatbot Design Canvas allows you to get a complete picture of the chatbot you are only thinking to build. Useful.

⌚️ 10 min read (long one)

https://medium.com/@srinivasancj/chatbot-design-canvas-c3940685ca2c

SendWyre, a money transfer service that uses blockchain tech, launched a chatbot!

It enables business owners easily send money to any person or business without worrying about high foreign exchange rates, hidden fees, complicated payout timing and high payment fees.

The bot simply asks a series of questions regarding the sender, recipient, and how much money needs to be sent. Then it initiates the request, prepares the invoice, and sends money in a few simple steps. Good UX and nice use case.

It seems that chatbots can really simplify money transferring process. Love that!

⌚️ 4 min read (good one)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/how-this-chatbot-is-making-traditional-money-transfers-more-simple-c5c7b65adbb