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

"Fantastic answer by the Google Assistant.
Scripted, not AI driven, and yet super fun."

(c) Amir Shevat

The first conversational marketing platform powered by AI just announced a $8.3 million series A funding!

Basically Automat helps companies use AI to talk to their customers, understand them and serve them better.

With this latest round of financing, Automat has raised $11M USD, the most amount of capital of any company focused on AI-driven conversational marketing.

That's solid.

⌚️ 4 min read (again)

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/announcing-automats-series-a-funding-andy-mauro

Today’s #botoftheweek is a great example of inline bots on Telegram.

Imagine, that you’re heading on a barbecue with a group of friends. Everyone is buying something and after a few iterations it’s a total mess. Nobody knows whom to pay and how much. The problem is pretty real, I personally were in this situation at least several times.

Using @splittybot, you can easily manage your group debts. Just add the bot to the group chat and start splitting the debts among all group members, that’s it. Also the team has recently added personal debts, which is pretty cool too.

Good use case and great UX. Love to share! ❤️

🚀 Try the bot here - @splittybot

P.S. We have a developer of Splittybot in our chat, so you can give him feedback right there.

Apple has launched a Business Chat!

Business Chat is a bid to turn iMessage into a communication platform and make it one of the main ways of interaction with businesses. These conversations will include basic text chats, but Apple is also offering support and structure for more complex interactions, like scheduling an appointment. Unfortunately, Business Chat is limited to human-to-human conversations for now. I hope they’ll add chatbots support in the nearest future.

I think that Apple has understood that they’ve missed a really rapidly growing conversational market (from chatbots to voice assistants) and their plan is to dive deep into it 🚀

⌚️ 2 min read (super short)

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/09/apple-unveils-business-chat

Both bot developers and users often face the case when a chatbot doesn’t understand the question or the user's input. As a result, your chatbot can lose users who came with a specific and important question. So there are some good ways how you can design your default answer block in more efficient way.

The article below covers 6 different ways for bots to behave when it doesn’t really understand something - from replying with another question back (aka “The Jewish Method”) to “Human entry point”. All of the points described in the article are from real world and we’ve used them on real projects. So, definitely worth reading 😉

⌚️4 min read (short one)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/6-efficient-practices-to-prevent-your-chatbot-from-being-a-dummy-731074b867c1

Awesome news!

The Bot Payment Platform now supports payments from more than 200 countries via 4 payment providers.

Three new payment providers have joined the platform since launch:

- Paymentwall, a global provider that works in 200 countries
- Yandex.Money, well known in Russia
- Paycom, popular in Uzbekistan

In case you missed it, you can read more about the payment platform here: https://telegram.org/blog/payments

We will be adding more payment providers soon. Follow @BotNews if you'd like to stay up to date on the latest bot new.

Hey botmakers! 💥 Vasili from BotCube is here. I'm super pumped that I was invited as a speaker to join the Grand Event about Chatbots and Voice assistants in Munich on June 23rd!!

This is going to be a massive event for everyone interested in chatbots, voice assistants, and the cognitive technologies they are powered by. I will be speaking about UX in bots and how to create great conversational experiences.

So if you have any questions about UX in bots or just want to catch up on a coffee in Munich, DM me here — @flreln, and we'll figure out something 😉

https://www.eventbrite.de/e/grand-event-about-chatbots-voice-assistants-tickets-34959056479?aff=Facebook

Do you want to get the current state of bots in 2017?

We are at the very start of a new age in communication between brands and their audience. And to get the whole picture, you need to know A LOT.

Guys from Ubisend asked over 2,000 UK consumers what they think of chatbots, and made a report that gives an exclusive insight into their mindset regarding chatbots and messaging.

Hope this will help you to build better bots. Really valuable ❤️

Our days are filled with a constant flow of negotiations, from discussing what TV channel to watch to convincing your kids to eat their vegetables or trying to get a better price on something. But can computers negotiate as good as people? 🤖

Researchers at Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research have published research introducing dialog agents with a new capability — the ability to negotiate. Even more than that - they’ve opensourced all the Python code and put in on Github!

The researchers have shown that it’s possible for dialog agents with different goals to engage in start-to-finish negotiations with other bots or people while arriving at common decisions or outcomes.

Article below shows visual flow of how two agents divide a set of items between themselves by negotiating. Interested? Just read the article 😉

⌚️7 min read (kinda long, but an interesting one)

https://code.facebook.com/posts/1686672014972296/deal-or-no-deal-training-ai-bots-to-negotiate

Hey guys, Maxim from BotCube is here! ✋🏻

We’ve just received our copy of a brand new book by Amir Shevat called “Designing bots”. The book is a practical guide that shows you how to design and build great conversational experiences and delightful bots that help people be more productive, whether it’s for a new consumer service or an enterprise efficiency product.

I’m personally super excited about it and can’t wait to read. Starting right now 😁

You can get your own copy here - https://goo.gl/C4Ae2v

Do you remember my post about KokoBot - a bot which helps you cure your mental diseases? Today we have a pretty similar one - a therapeutic chatbot created by a team of Stanford psychologists and AI experts called Woebot. A randomized test at Stanford University showed that college students aged 18–28 years who chatted with this therapeutic Woebot, significantly reduced the symptoms of depression in 2 weeks.

Woebot has been introduced as a 24/7 helper and can track moods, give insights and teach stuff using cognitive-behavioral therapy. Woebot gradually learns about the users and the more the conversations are, the better Woebot understands the user.

All of these chatbots slightly remind me about one of the Black Mirror series episode if you know what I mean 😉

⌚️3 min read (kinda short)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/charming-therapeutic-chatbot-debuts-on-your-fb-messenger-aaf429411816

Read about Kokobot: https://news.1rj.ru/str/botcube/82

Hey botmakers!

I’m visiting two largest chatbot events next week.

One is entirely full (300 registrants), and I’m a speaker there 😎

But you still have a chance to register for Chatbot Summit, which will be in Berlin on June 26.

It’s the largest event in bot space in the world.

Just imagine. Over 1500 delegates, 80 speakers, and dozens of startups & investors.

Companies like Deutsche Bank, Deloitte, LivePerson, SAP, Deutsche Post, Zalando, Deutsche Telekom, Lufthansa, ThomasCook, Nestle, Google, Amazon, IBM, and many more.

Isn’t that awesome??

To make it even better, we provide a 30% discount code for you guys, to take part in this conference.

To get the discount, just follow the link below and enter MVBOT30 code, while purchasing tickets.

BotCube loves you ❤️

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chatbot-summit-tickets-berlin-june-26-2017-tickets-31936365529?aff=MVBOT&afu=216763317654

Do you remember the song "Kim" by Eminem? If your answer is no - you’re so young, kid 👶

Now you can experience one of Eminem’s most controversial songs on Facebook Messenger with a very specific #botoftheweek.

Marshall caught his wife, Kim, being unfaithful on her Instagram Stories and decided to kill her 🔪

Start this horror story about the murder of Marshall's wife by just chatting with him here - https://goo.gl/Z82WN7.

P.S. The story contains strong language ⚠️

https://medium.com/@joshbocanegra/kim-is-a-horror-story-on-messenger-about-the-murder-of-marshalls-wife-e09f626399cc

Monetization is one of the main issues with chatbots.

There are a very small number of bot experiences that the general public is currently willing to pay for and through research. And it's a real problem.
So these are three core features needed to monetize bots in our current ecosystem that are capable of generating significant revenue. Don’t want to waste you time, just take a look at the article and then take actions 💪🏻

⌚️11 min read (long one)

https://medium.com/@kemardarlington/the-features-you-need-to-monetize-bots-a5e40cffef18

Other monetization tools are here: https://github.com/BotCube/awesome-bots#monetization

Google has recently announced Google for Jobs, a new company-wide initiative focused on helping both job seekers and employers, through collaboration with the job matching industry. And now it's a new opportunity for chatbots there!

Chatbot can be used for interaction between applicants and recruiters:
1. They engage on candidate’s schedules.
2. Chatbots are patient and listen attentively.
3. Chatbots allow recruiters to make data-driven decisions.

Article below reveals why it can be more useful than real communication.

⌚️3 min read (kinda short)

https://blog.wadeandwendy.ai/google-for-jobs-opening-the-door-for-applicant-experience-chatbots-4784f40de804

Do you remember recent chat extensions launch on Facebook Messenger? 🤔

Spotify has just released a huge update for their extension. They’ve announced that users of the Spotify Bot on Facebook Messenger can now make playlists with groups and friends. Prior to the launch of the new feature, the bot was able to share individual songs, recently played songs, or albums recommended by Spotify.

Personally I was waiting for this feature for quite a long time, and you? 😉

More info is in the article below.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/21/you-can-now-make-spotify-group-playlists-in-facebook-messenger/

Bots UX is still the number one problem in this area, so I really want to continue posting here articles about how to make chatbot world a better place for all of us 🌎

Here is an article featuring a very small nuance that makes a huge difference - message delays.

The primary reason why delays exist is so that users have enough time to read a message before another message is displayed, but from my side the most important reason message delays is a “must have”, is to convey personality. And I genuinely believe that it’s a really big deal - let me tell you why.

We’ve recently built a bot for kids audience (from 5 to 10 yrs old) and we have really hacked their behavior by using a very specific technique with message delays. Kids were spending about 15 minutes in a bot and returning 3-4 times. That’s insane and I’ll definitely write an article on Medium explaining the phenomenon. But until that time I highly encourage you to read the article below and start building better and more engaging bots 🤖

https://medium.com/@jindalish/chatbot-building-best-practices-1-message-delays-9fc8eb75e3b6

By the way, @flreln have talked about UX in bots at the “Grand Event about Bots” event in Munich yesterday, so join our public chat (@botcubechat) or message me (@maximabramchuk) to get the link to the keynote, it really worth it ;)