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 ;)

Hey botmakers, I'm at the Chabot Summit Berlin today, listening to the talks and meeting the best people in the whole industry (like guys from Swelly, Heroes, Poncho, Google, and Craftworks).

Tap the heart below if you want to get the short summary of interesting talks here, and I'll send it directly to the channel. And happy botting 😎

The weekend is over and it does mean 2 things:
1. It's a perfect day to start hustling and following your dream 💪🏻
2. It's a #botoftheweek day 😃

Do you remember guys from Visabot - the chatbot that is helping facilitate the influx of international talent into the U.S? Seems like they are going to disrupt legal market with the launch of their new product - Advobot. And it’s definitely a #botoftheweek.

Doing documents often takes a lot of time. But thanks to Advobot legal will never be the same again. Advobot is a magic way to create your bespoke legal documents effortlessly in just seconds and sign them online. It turns the best legal expertise into the documents tailored for your particular case. The team behind Advobot has started with an NDA to keep your secrets secret but it’s planning to expand documents range rapidly ;)

The bot is available on Slack - https://advobot.co

Twitter has been improving its Direct Messaging experience during last couple of months. And today they are rolling out a new feature: the company is introducing the ability for businesses to add buttons inside their direct message conversation 💬

But unlike Facebook's one, Twitter's new buttons are much more basic. They are simply appended to a message a company send to a customer and designed to encourage customers to do things like tweet about the company’s Twitter bot, visit their website, follow the business’s Twitter account, or start a chat with another account the business runs, among other things.

Twitter is gradually making their Direct Messages fully a chatbot platform and I'm super pumped about it! 👍

⌚ 3 min read (short one)

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/13/twitter-chatbots-can-now-add-buttons-that-push-you-to-tweet-follow-click-more/

Looks like Amazon is going to finish the old landline story at all 📞

The company has just pushed an update for its Echo family of smart speakers that enables a handy room-to-room intercom feature.

What are the main opportunities of this update?
- You can initiate walkie-talkie style chats between the house with a voice command (if you have got multiple Echo).
- You can start a call from the Alexa app on your phone from anywhere.

That’s useful for checking in your kids or elderly parents quicker than phoning them.

Amazon is rolling out the feature over the next few days, so it should be available on your devices soon.

⌚️2 min read (really short)

https://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2017/06/27/amazon-echo-now-works-as-a-home-intercom/

Adding more languages to your bot seems to be a simple thing and a great opportunity too: the more languages you can teach your bot, the more clients will be interested in buying your services as a bot developer. But it’s a challenging UX problem and not simply the matter of translating all text. Think of it as a redesign project or building new versions of your bot and this approach should help ensure a bug-free, enjoyable UX.

Non AI-based bots with carousels, buttons can be created in other languages with ease as they are just like apps. In the case of AI-based bots, it is a completely different ball game. The amount of work you have to put in is at least 100 times of that.

In the article below author has shared some workflow insights he has collected from bot developers and also his localizer’s perspective on building with future localization in mind, shaping a localizable personality, crafting a localizable noscript, and even the dangers of your bot using certain emojis when socializing with foreigners 😲

Article is super big but valuable as fuck. Try to find time on weekend to read or at least to take a look 📖

⌚️21 min read (super big)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/do-you-want-your-chatbot-converse-in-foreign-languages-my-learnings-from-bot-devs-9b608f685f5b

I’ve already posted here that Facebook announced a new Discover tab in Messenger at F8 conference a couple of months ago. But today they’ve announced that this new tab for finding featured bots and brands will be rolled out to Messenger users in the United States in the coming days. The Discover tab breaks up these conversations into a dozen categories including 📚 education, 💵 personal finance, 🗞 news, ⚽️ sports, and 🛍 shopping.

The discovery has always been a problem for all the bot developers. But seems like big messaging platforms began to move in this direction. Google and Microsoft have also taken steps recently to improve bot discovery for their platforms. Last month, Google announced plans to launch an App Store for its voice apps, and a business can now add Skype to its website or deploy bots to Bing search results. Noteworthy bots can also be found in the redesigned Skype app, whose Find section, much like the original Discover tab, highlights local businesses and showcases popular or featured bots.

With the Discover platform launching, there’s surely going to be a lot more attention on chatbots and we’ll see which opportunities it will open for us 🤖

https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/28/facebook-messengers-new-discover-tab-features-top-bots/

Seems like it’s a week of chatbot news about Facebook, these guys are going huge 💪🏻

They’ve just launched an official directory called “Platform Development Providers”. It’s a list of platforms that can help you achieve your business objectives: raise awareness, acquire customers, enable transactions, and provide service. From human support solutions to automation at scale, find the provider that's right for your goals.

A lot of big players are already submitted, don’t miss your opportunity to be among the first batch 😉

Apply here: https://www.facebook.com/business/products/messenger-for-business/development-providers

Hey guys, I’ve just found a really awesome article called “The chatbot masquerade” 🎭

It’s a great introduction into a lot of things about chatbots:
1. Different ways of building them: rule-based and AI-based, differences and definitions.
2. Six key steps of NLP.
3. Why do chatbots fail.
4. And also 4 advices on building better chatbots.

It helped me to summarize a lot of things about NLP and bot UX in my mind. A perfect long-read for a Saturday chill ⛱

⌚️ 14 min (kinda long, but awesome)

https://www.callr.com/blog/chatbot-masquerade

Hey botmakers, it’s time for our #botoftheweek series!

Have you ever had your flight cancelled? No compensation, no bonuses, just wasted time and money. Brrr..

There’s a bot for that! 🤖

CashBackAir bot helps to freely and easily get compensation in case of flight delay or cancellation.

So you just enter your anonymous data on your air in a chat, and then in case of flight delay or cancellation the bot informs you about the possibility of getting compensation, and sends you a link to a simple application form.

After you fill it in, you just have to wait for the money — from €250 to €600. By the way, it enables operations with future flights too, which is pretty cool.

The bot works both on Telegram and Facebook Messenger. The use case is great, and I personally love the UX (believe me, it’s hard to impress such a UX badass as me).

Send upvotes if you like this one 👍

http://cashbackairbot.com/

Even when there is a big list of analytical platforms for bots that are easy to use, a lot of folks in our Bot Chat (@botcubechat) continue asking me about the super simple way to integrate analytics into their bot.

Seems like people want to use Google Analytics since they are familiar with that. 😕

So, I decided to write a simple post showing a quick way of integration GA into a Node.js bot. I hope it will be helpful for you, guys 😉

https://medium.com/@MaximAbramchuk/how-to-integrate-simple-analytics-into-your-chatbot-e68db7e257e6

Full list of analytics tools for bots: https://github.com/BotCube/awesome-bots#analytics

Messaging is tried and true. Conversational UI continues to develop rapidly, and I see designers are generating more & more good ideas in that field, that are more flexible, elegant, and context-specific.

Nevertheless, we’re still very early.

It’s like an iPhone 10 years ago.

With no third-party apps, no App Store, but with horrible reviews from some well-known industry experts.

That’s why every masterpiece here matters. And that’s the original goal behind this channel — to bring you those masterpieces.

And I have one more for you today.

Guys from Pullstring recently wrote a real thing on conversational design (as always).

It covers some real pains in conversational design and gives you great advices how to deal with them.

Like, for example, engaging language. Do we need to engage users? Or it is only industry specific? Does it sound any good?

100% yes.

“Engaging language makes the communication of necessary information (e.g. confirming shipping details, articulating product differences, capturing user information), which could be quite dry, more enjoyable.

Users are not only more likely to stay engaged if they’re enjoying themselves, they’re more likely to return to the bot a second, third, fourth, fiftieth time.”

Make sure you note all the tips, it’s a golden chest.

https://www.pullstring.com/blog/utility-and-delight

Winter is here, which means that we have a lot of questions about the coming season of Game of Thrones. The series fans are getting a little antsy waiting for the new season, so to hold them over a new bot has rolled out. Embedded into Facebook Messenger, social media users can now talk with the quip-making GoTBot which features the avatar, if not deadly persuasion, of a white walker.

Utilising NLP framework, the bot can learn from users and connect them with stores of GoT information, while also throwing out a joke or Easter Egg or two. The agency said: “The more questions users ask, the more data we can capture and ensure that we update GoTBot so that it can answer these queries.” 🤖

I’m personally super pumped that more and more brands are starting to use bots as a new promotion channel 🚀

https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/3/15914692/game-of-thrones-chatbot-season-six-storyline-facts-memory

Talk to a bot here: https://www.messenger.com/t/G0TB0T

Do you remember a new visual assistant by Amazon called Echo Show? It has went on sale for the first time last week 🚚

According to the statistics, one of the most popular categories in the first sales week was food. Yea. Calorie counter Track by Nutritionix has added visuals telling you how many calories are in a food; OpenTable books restaurants; and you can now place Starbucks orders with the new visual interface. The reason of this popularity is simple - food sucks without visuals.

YouTube on Echo Show can also help you make a meal. Just say “Alexa, show me YouTube videos of how to cook macaroni and cheese” and up pops a series of choices. I’m sure that there will a plenty of other cooking and DIY apps with visual elements joining Alexa Store in the next couple of months.

Seems like Amazon have created a brand new platform with a huge potential. Again. Don’t miss your opportunity and start building skills for this super sexy platform 😉

https://venturebeat.com/2017/07/04/how-amazons-echo-show-can-change-how-you-cook-dinner/

Developer docs are available here: https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/docs/build-skills-for-echo-show

Silicon Valley is blown up by the latest news of famous VCs been involved in sexual harassment issues, so the topic is really serious right now. And bots are involved in it too.

In 2017 bots are already scheduling meetings, ordering meals, and analyzing bank accounts. They’re now well on their way to becoming our full-time virtual assistants. That means they must now suffer the indignities unethical bosses inflict on their human assistants, especially sexual harassment.

And the problem is really huge, according to the statistics of a couple of bot platforms about 5% of interactions in their database are categorized as clearly sexually explicit, although he believes the actual number is far higher due to the difficulty of identifying them automatically.

The article below covers different problems and implications related to sexual topic bot developers including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft face on a daily basis.

https://qz.com/818151/virtual-assistant-bots-like-siri-alexa-and-cortana-spend-much-of-their-time-fending-off-sexual-harassment/

Hey botmakers,

I have HUGE news.

Our awesome-bots repo on Github has recently passed 650 stars!

It’s literally the biggest resource about bots so far, and I’m so pumped to get positive feedback about it every day.

We updated a few topics there, such as Analytics, Bot directories and tools for Customer service.

More sub topics to come 🙂

https://github.com/BotCube/awesome-bots

Are you building voice bots for Alexa?

If not, you’re missing a big opportunity out there.

Alexa has now passed 15,000 skills, with 3x increase from last September.

What’s interesting here is that most popular skills are still Flash Briefings — voice-activated news pieces from different publications.

Comparing to other platforms, Alexa is much ahead. Google Home has just 378 voice apps available as of June 30, and Microsoft’s Cortana has only 65.

You should definitely bet on Alexa as business or bot developer.

Right now the quality of bots out there is not so good, and it’s a big opportunity.

Don’t wait until it will be great.

Don’t wait until every business will be there.

Start building now.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/03/amazons-alexa-passes-15000-skills-up-from-10000-in-february/

Wish you had Slack’s brain?

Now, you can have it sitting in front of your laptop.

Slack recently published all best practices they have collected in building conversational interfaces for business bots use cases.

They’re giving away literally 99,9% of their bot hacks.

Just grab this link to your bookmarks, dig into it, and boost your business bots.

It’s that easy.

https://api.slack.com/best-practices

I thought a lot about our #botoftheweek section.

Then it hit me.

I need to make a guide out of every successful case we go through at #botoftheweek.

Why?

Because there are dozens of unique approaches and features hidden in products I share every week, and it would be not fair if I keep that golden chest away from you.

Starting today, every #botoftheweek post is a Medium publication with highlighted insights and key features of every bot, explained in details.

I’m sure it will bring a lot more value to this community to get what’s under the hood of these products.

And the first one is right here 🙂

https://medium.com/@flreln/emily-bot-review-botoftheweek-28-a2f82124fb52