Why Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant beat Cortana and any others? 🤔

Microsoft’s former AI expert, Qi Lu, has provided some rare insight into Microsoft’s struggles to compete with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant.

“I worked on Cortana four and a half years ago. At the time we all were like, Amazon, yeah, that technology is so far behind”.

“Google and Microsoft, technologically, were ahead of Amazon by a wide margin. But look at the AI race today. The Amazon Alexa ecosystem is far ahead of anybody else in the United States.”

Lu believes Microsoft and Google “made the same mistake” of focusing on the phone and PC for voice assistants, instead of a dedicated device.

Microsoft first introduced Cortana ahead of Alexa as a promising digital assistant for its Windows Phone devices, then expanded it to be built into Windows 10 for PCs and into the company’s Xbox One console.

Cortana will also run on various Internet of Things (IoT) devices like fridges, toasters, thermostats, and even cars in Microsoft’s latest bid to catch up and beat Amazon’s popular Alexa voice assistant.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/14/16142642/microsoft-cortana-amazon-alexa-qi-lu

Amazon is going huge on building community around their voice assistant 📈

Amazon Alexa team has recently launched a program in partnership with Arizona State University (ASU).

The program itself is designed to enhance students’ ASU experience by giving them touch-free access to information and services tailored to campus living — and prepare some of them to become leaders in voice-technology development.

Incoming freshmen engineering students will be able to build their own Alexa skills or capabilities and join the growing community of voice developers.

“Our focus is putting this technology into the hands of our students in a way that will build an ecosystem that supports voice technologies throughout the ASU campus.”

I’m pretty sure that ASU is a perfect fit for Amazon because it has been ranked No. 1 in innovation by U.S. News & World Report for two years in a row, staying the course by embedding innovation into its schools, departments, athletics and student experiences.

I’m really pumped to see how Amazon is building an ecosystem around voice by doing such a program, that is a really smart move from these guys 👍

https://asunow.asu.edu/20170817-asu-news-asu-amazon-dots-tooker-house

Here’s one video from the last F8 conference that everyone missed.

It deeply covers the death of decision trees, webviews, structured menus, and chat extensions.

Incredibly helpful for beginners.

Here's the link: https://developers.facebook.com/videos/f8-2017/how-to-build-a-great-bot

Zendesk has just released their new #botoftheweek for customer support automation.

Boom!

I’ve seen a lot of startups trying to do the same thing, but it was only a matter of time before the big players made it a feature.

What’s interesting here is that both Intercom and Zendesk position their bots less as bots or conversational assistants and more like a knowledge base products.

That makes a lot of sense — there’s so much value in the content assets that customers have already created and sometimes it's just about helping connect the dots.

Top 4 features of Zendesk bot:

1. It works wherever your customers are: Answer Bot already works across several channels including email and API which typically don’t have great automated self service experiences. They’re also extending Answer Bot to create new in-channel experiences for web form, web widget, chat, and our SDKs in the near future.

2. Activate and go: They’ve removed the complexity to make it as easy as possible for anyone to start using Answer Bot straight away. No training time or massive data sets needed. (You’re wondering how? Because it’s trained on over 12 million customer service interactions to deliver accurate and reliable responses. And it’ll continue to learn and grow.)

3. Learns from customers and agents: Interactions between Answer Bot and your customers are clearly presented to your support team, allowing them to see the actions customers have taken to avoid suggesting the same content again. Your support team can also provide pointers to Answer Bot to help it learn over time.

4. Optimize performance with reporting: Generate amazing insights into where Answer Bot performs well and where you may need to create or improve your self-service content.

Let the automation battle begin! 🤖

https://www.zendesk.com/answer-bot

Have you always been thinking about creating a bot for Google Home?

It’s never been easier!

A couple of Google Assistant Developer Program engineers has just launched a template tool to create trivia games for the Google Assistant.

The template turns your questions and answers from a spreadsheet into a fully functioning game without writing any code.

Isn’t that cool?

1. Pick a Persona.
2. Enter your data to a Google Sheet template.
3. Set up your project in Google Actions console.
4. Test your app.
5. Submit your app.
6. Let the game begin.

It is also open-source so you can add your own features too.

Enjoy and have fun building voice bots 😉

https://medium.com/@leonnicholls/google-assistant-trivia-template-d0e5d12fc200

Template: https://triviatemplate.com/
Template source code: https://github.com/actions-on-google/apiai-trivia-game-nodejs

Over the past few months, it’s been all but impossible to escape the growing buzz around voice technology. From Amazon’s Echo to Google Home to Apple’s HomePod, it seems like everyone’s getting into the game.

Here is an article from Alon Bonder, VC at Venrock, that presents an overview of how space has evolved, and a few areas he is excited about for investment.

The most interesting part of the article for me personally is a list of native advantages of the voice in general with areas that worth trying to build project in.

If you’re interested in voice - really worth reading or at least adding to your Pocket to read during the weekend, I promise 😉

https://medium.com/startup-grind/why-voice-tech-is-about-to-see-major-love-from-vcs-341a9b05cc2b

OMG, this is just hilarious.

Excited about the future of voice interfaces ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvT_gqs5ETk

Google is not gonna give up in the voice assistant game 🥊

They are reportedly planning to release a smaller version of its Google Home smart speaker later this year.

The features available in the mini Google Home are not yet known, but if the reports are true, Google Home could be complemented by a series of smaller, potentially cheaper speakers that you can place throughout your home.

This is similar to how Amazon Echo owners can leverage Echo Dots to spread voice control and music throughout their homes.

A survey conducted earlier this year found that price was the single most important determinant in whether consumers buy a smart speaker.

That’s probably why the $50 Echo Dot was the top selling item on Amazon’s Prime Day in July.

A lower-cost Google Home — which at $129 is cheaper than an Echo ($179) but more expensive than two Echo Dots — could help Google compete against Amazon and other tech giants who plan to launch their own smart speakers in months to come.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/21/google-is-reportedly-working-on-a-smaller-smart-speaker-to-take-on-amazons-echo-dot/

Facebook Messenger now supports markdown!

You can style your messages on messenger.com and facebook.com, no iOS/Android support yet.

HINT: _text_ is italic, *text* is bold, `text `is monospace.

What do you know about the conversational design?

If you do know a lot - let’s talk (@maximabramchuk) 🙃

If not - I have a golden gem for you today.

The article below contains a case study describing an entire process of designing a conversational UI for a B2B website, including fragments of the conversation noscript, basics of the communication theory and some of the tips and tricks that can make the project a bit unique.

It’s quite long, but trust me - this thing is really interesting and insanely useful.

https://medium.com/swlh/conversational-ui-principles-complete-process-of-designing-a-website-chatbot-d0c2a5fee376

Just found a great video for you guys.

Here Amir Shevat, the head of developer relations @ Slack, is talking about bot anatomy.

He covered some interesting details of the Slack platform, bot users, conversational design, and shared his own tips & tricks for designing bots.

“When you are writing an onboarding for your bot, think about it as an onboarding of a new employee to the team. How do you onboard them? Use the same paradigm, the same way of thinking to onboard a bot.”

Have a great weekend! 🤖

https://youtu.be/8zBSJg62hRI

We need your help! 🙌

We’re working on a product for conversational design and I know there are a lot people here who designed/prototyped bots and conversational interfaces.

If you’re one of those people - please fill in the Typeform I attached below, it won’t take more than 10 minutes, but will be insanely helpful for us.

P.S. Every bot designer who passes the survey will get an early access to our conversational design tool.

If you have any questions or suggestions - feel free to ask me (@maximabramchuk).

Thank you!

https://maximabramchuk.typeform.com/to/OqqEwp

Do you want to know which Speech Recognition API is the fastest one?

Here is a great article that presents benchmarking results for three speech to text providers:
1. Google Cloud Speech API
2. IBM Watson
3. Microsoft Speech Bing API

According to the results, Google Cloud Speech seems to be the better solution as they have the most accurate and consistent results, but it is the most expensive.

IBM Watson suffers a big drop in performance when working with French speech.

Moreover, the response time is way too high for real-time usage.

Microsoft is in the middle with a good response time.

If you want to learn more, here is the article with comprehensive denoscription: https://chatbotsmagazine.com/you-shall-not-speak-benchmarking-famous-speech-recognition-apis-for-chatbots-1c04e8ce2c66

We are moving closer to bots on WhatsApp

WhatsApp is beginning to verify business accounts with a green badge next to the user’s phone number.

“If you see a green badge next to a contact’s name, it means that WhatsApp has confirmed that the phone number of this contact belongs to a business account”.

Conversations with businesses will also be distinguished from others because all business messages will come in yellow.

It doesn’t look like a really big deal, but it appears to be one of the first signs of WhatsApp’s effort to connect businesses with customers.

Since WhatsApp is insanely popular in a big number of countries, that will open up a plenty of opportunities for bot builders.

These guys are reportedly testing the platform since the beginning of the year, so let’s hope they’ll finally release something soon 🙌

https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/29/whatsapp-is-verifying-business-accounts/

Hey folks, I’m a little bit late, but #botoftheweek is here!

Today’s bot works on Slack and helps you as a business owner to set goals, track performance and reward excellence.

The name is pretty straight-forward by the way, it’s called KarmaBot.

It has a plenty of features to boost your company performance and improve culture, such as setting monthly monetary bonuses based on Karma points, encouraging team members to share some Karma between each other, giving extra points to the teams for faster shipping and much more.

My favorite feature here is an ability to share some karma points with my team members to reward them for doing a great job.

It really works, and feels great too.

I really advise you try it: http://karmabot.chat

“Cortana, Open Alexa”, Amazon says. And Microsoft agrees.

Amazon and Microsoft announced something of a curveball this morning as they released plans to integrate Alexa and Cortana, their respective voice-activated digital assistants.

Later this year, consumers will be able to request Cortana support through Alexa-powered devices, such as Amazon’s range of Echo smart speakers, while those using a Cortana-enabled device will be able to beckon Alexa.

To activate Alexa through Cortana, you would say: “Hey Cortana, open Alexa,” and vice versa when using an Alexa-powered device, such as an Amazon Echo.

Then you could, for example, order groceries through Amazon from your Windows 10 PC, or activate Cortana on your Echo to find out when your next meeting is from your Outlook calendar.

By pooling their resources, the duo could go some way toward elevating their collective AI smarts over that of rivals.

Your move, Apple and Google.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/technology/amazon-alexa-microsoft-cortana.html

Remember I told you I will share my insights from the Chatbot Summit?

It's time for the very first one.

During the conference, I met Adrian Zumbrunnen, who is a UX designer, writer, and speaker, currently working on conversational interfaces @ Google.

We had a great chat after his talk and Adrian shared his experience of building conversational user interfaces with me.

Earlier this year, he made his website conversational.

The feedback, responses, and media coverage have been absolutely amazing. He received over 300 emails within the first 24 hours.

He collected all his insights in one article and I HIGHLY recommend you to read it.

https://uxdesign.cc/my-website-is-now-conversational-here-is-what-i-learned-7e943cc6ace0

Our awesome-bots repo passed 850 stars today!

That’s fucken huge.

Half a year ago, when @maximabramchuk created it, we couldn’t even think of so many people using it every day.

Now it’s literally the place for bot makers to learn, share, and grow together. There’s so much info there, starting from newsletters and podcasts to tools, platforms, and guides.

For the last 12 days we had 1,654 views and 815 unique visitors browsing this gem.

That’s the power of open source.

Thank you so much for your support!!

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

Still missing the Alexa opportunity?

Here’s one more bullet to push you forward.

Amazon today announced the launch of the first Alexa skills made especially for kids, with skills from Sesame Street, SpongeBob SquarePants, and others.

I just checked the skills on my Echo dot and they look phenomenal.

The stories are designed specifically for kids, with the voice of actual characters (like SpongeBob). They are engaging, fun, and easy to play.

By the way, the Alexa Skills Store now has more than 18,000 skills made by Amazon, businesses, and third-party developers.

What are you waiting for?

https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/31/sesame-street-and-spongebob-among-first-alexa-skills-for-kids/

Hey Telegram folks,

Today’s #botoftheweek shows a great example of solving a very clear problem via messenger interface.

Lenny is a bot that helps you to learn 10 new English words every day in order to increase your vocabulary.

It has been launched only 2 months ago but already has about 3k daily active users and 36 paid ones.

Sound interesting, right?

Read the full review here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Nl5p5TaqgjTd8uNQwhqiUsiyETg6v77KFfTK9WPI1yk/edit