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

#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!

#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

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

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