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

An excellent post from Mikhail Larionov (Facebook Messenger Team) supporting the use of webviews in Facebook bots. In the mind of a normal user chatbot is always a thing you interact with natural language. But bots are not about NL anymore. Webviews will play an important role in the future of bots. Every day we are getting closer and closer to bots being lightweight mobile apps. Worth reading.

https://goo.gl/8UrSZC

Today I want to share with you one more book called “Bot Business 101: How to start, run & grow your Bot / AI business”. I’ve started reading it a couple of days ago and found it pretty interesting. It’s written by the CEO of Botego, company which have been building conversational interfaces/bots since 2007 (wow). There are a lot of interesting topics for all the people related to bots (business owners, developers, marketers etc.): pricing bots, finding an idea, increasing retention, direct contact with brands, after-sales support and many more. It’s not so huge, so can be easily read in one happy Saturday evening ;) #books

Amazon Kindle version: https://goo.gl/90QRUS
Direct link (DOCX): https://goo.gl/o6uIZR

Great news guys, top 1 pizza brand Domino’s continues its expansion and launches their ordering bot called Dom right before the Super Bowl. Actually I was pretty surprised when I read that previously company launched a bunch of bots on a plenty of other platforms like Twitter, Apple TV, Google Home, Amazon Echo, Samsung smart TVs, watches etc. There is, however, a big caveat – if you’re placing a delivery order via Dom, you have to pay in cash. C’mon, cash? No one uses that anymore! Especially not the sort of early adopter crowd that would think ordering via chatbot is cool. The pizza chain said that Messenger payments is something it’s looking into for the future, though.

And again, for us it’s a good piece of news which shows a constantly growing interest of top brands to its audience in messengers.

https://goo.gl/O9WCAa

Funny (or frightening) piece of news on Monday, guys!

During Super Bowl game, Google’s ad for the Google Home aired on millions of TVs: loving families at home meeting, hugging, and being welcomed by the Google Assistant. Someone says “Okay, Google,” and that’s one has triggered a whole bunch of Google Assistants all over the United States. This isn’t the first time television has set off people’s home assistants. A month ago, a TV broadcast accidentally triggered a whole bunch of Amazon Echos.

At some point, some enterprising TV writer or ad jerk is gonna plant an “Okay, Google” on TV with intent and force everyone to listen to the music he wants or to buy something on Amazon. This is a massive troll waiting to happen.

https://goo.gl/wiiZs6

When we’ve been working on our “bots for celebrities” product called Virtz, our users were in love with it, the average session was quite long (7 minutes), but we faced one big issue - users were trying it once or twice, and then forgetting about it. We did try to implement different retention features like ability to subscribe to notification about celebrity new Instagram post or Youtube video, but people were furious when we sent them messages and blocked our bot. So, we definitely made a huge mistake in conversation design and fucked up our retention rate.

The article below is a similar story (but with the happy-end) from the team behind Meekan, a Slack bot for scheduling. There you can find out their steps to get from 0.5% to 60% retention rate.

https://goo.gl/ZEiaaq

I think that one of the best and simplest bot cases right now is gathering user attitude and thoughts about some news/events. And Washington Post media agree with me on that. They’ve build a simple Facebook Messenger bot called Feels to track people’s feelings about the USA President election. Bot messages you every day and asks a simple question: “How is the election making you feel today?”. You need to respond with one emoji from the predefined set - (😄 🙂 😐 😢 😠). And that’s it. Sounds like useless/boring stuff? A full 85% of users stayed subscribed throughout the entire experiment, aha.

In the early days users reported feeling mostly 😐, for a wide variety of different reasons. But emotions change around some significant points in the race.

This gif shows how reactions to the election changed on key dates

Article about the experiment

PayPal today launched its first bot for users of team messaging app Slack. The bot lets people send peer-to-peer (P2P) payments with the shortcode /paypal and a user’s Slack handle. Basically you can say in a chat: /Paypal send @lauren $6 for Tuesday’s Latte. Confirm transaction via tapping button on the webview and that’s it.

This is PayPal’s first bot but not its first venture into the emerging chatbot ecosystem. Last November, PayPal joined Square Cash and Venmo to allow P2P payments with Siri. Weeks earlier, PayPal and Stripe joined a Facebook Messenger beta program to accept payments through the platform.

Demo video
Announcement

I really like Intercom and here is an article from them about the future of chatbots with explanations why voice will be the dominant chatbot interface.

2016 showed us that texting chatbots is hard and takes time and effort. That’s why a lot of people right now tend to think that voice interface is a solution. But I think they are wrong. Good conversational design is a solution. As for me, I don’t see the voice to be the dominant chatbot interface, I think there’ll be more of a combination. While it’s super convenient to order a pizza with voice commands while driving a car, there are a plenty of situations when you don’t want to say something aloud.

I’ve shared a poll below to ask your opinion about this point, thanks for voting!

https://goo.gl/50cnEp

Will the voice be the dominant chatbot interface in 5 years?

Few days ago the Russian Orthodox Church released a new social network build on top of Telegram.

In this dedicated social network users can join the official channels of over 16 000 churches as well as connect to people within the same church. They can receive news, Bible readings and organise volunteer help.

Within the social network users can also use different chatbots available on Telegram. For example a chatbot which searches for a nearest pharmacy ect.

You can try the Telegram Social Network yourself here (available in 8 languages)

I think that Paypal integration to receive donations from volunteers will look interesting here:

/Paypal send @priest_michael 200 rubles for Tuesday’s candle