All bot developers,

Would you like to win €5,000 and get my mentorship?

Over the next 16 weeks, you can do just that.

I'm thrilled to announce that I'm a part of the jury of a chatbot competition by Hu:toma!

The challenge is to design, develop, and market the best bots you can that utilize the Hu:toma API.

My goal is to help you through the challenges you face and work with you as you iterate on conversation design, struggle with retention, and run adverts to your bots.

You can submit your bot against one of six categories with category winners announced every two weeks.

The prize pool:
- 6x €500 category winners
- 1x €5000 Overall Winner (Quite a Christmas present)

Join here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/botdesigners/

Cheers, @flreln

Amazon is starting to solve the discovery problem on Alexa platform

Amazon is making it easier for Echo and Alexa-powered device owners to find voice apps that extend the functionality of its virtual assistant.

Previously, if you wanted to find a skill that suited your needs, then, you’d have to browse through the Alexa Skill Store on the web or in the Alexa companion app.

For instance, Alexa would often respond like, “Hmmm. I don’t know that,” or she might tell you to check back later.

However, now things are changing.

Recently, the virtual assistant has gotten clued into what the voice apps written for her platform can do, and will make suggestions if she thinks there’s one that can help you with your question.

The move to suggest skills could help increase adoption of voice apps on the dominant smart speaker platform.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/05/amazon-alexa-now-responds-to-certain-questions-with-skills-that-can-help-you-when-alexa-cant/

You guys know what advice I give on my consulting sessions?

Seventy plus people used these hacks to improve their bots.

Wanna get them?

Subscribe via Messenger here:
https://manychat.com/l1/vasilishynkarenka

Next issues will include my advice to chatbot competition members (I’m a part of a judging lineup there) along with my own bot tips & tactics.

This is the last time I give my advice for free.

I do that because I see a huge number of bots being designed, noscripted, and built in the wrong way.

Let’s fix them.

Hey all the botmakers, it's finally happening.

WhatsApp is launching a separate app for businesses which allows them to communicate with their customers.

Our community member Omar Pera has just published an incredible guide to "WhatsApp for Business" with a detailed overview of the current situation.

It also features a very first and quite interesting "WhatsApp for business" case from KLM.

A plenty of new possibilities are opening right now, be sure not to miss them.

Read the guide and share it with your friends, let's be prepared.

https://chatbotslife.com/whatsapp-for-business-a-beginners-guide-bots-4a98ac93f4c

Manychat made an official launch of Zapier integration today.

It means that now you can connect ManyChat to Google Sheets, Slack, MailChimp, ActiveCampaign and 750+ other apps.

This gives you huge opportunities for using their Messenger marketing platform together with your favorite CRM and email marketing services.

Here are some of possible use cases:

1. You can add a lead in your CRM when you get a new subscriber in ManyChat automatically
2. Ask a subscriber for an email / phone number inside the bot and add it to your email marketing service / CRM
3. Register subscribers to a webinar with 1 tap (love this one)

Excited to test this soon :)

https://zapier.com/zapbook/manychat/

Google Assistant is about to get a lot smarter

Google engineer gave a peek at some of the assistant’s improved natural language understanding and computer vision this week at Google Developer Days.

He called this demo a “mixture of things which are live and launched,” and said each new feature would become available “within the next few months or the next year.”

Features mentioned include a lot of interesting stuff:

1. Google Lens computer vision
Google Lens can identify objects, text, and buildings just by pointing your camera at something. With Lens, Google Assistant gets the ability to see, then talk to you about what it identifies with your camera.

2. On-the-spot translation
To showcase this feature, Behzadi told Google Assistant “Be my Vietnamese translator” and the assistant performed real-time translation, both with text on the phone and through the Assistant’s voice.

3. Better contextual understanding
So you will be able to say “Where is the Empire State building?” Then “I want to see pictures” or “Who built it?,” and you’ll get Empire State building results. Say “What are the Italian restaurants around there?” and Google Assistant will serve up listings near the Empire State building.

4. Personalization
You can already tell Google Assistant to remember the name of your favorite sports team. In the future you will be able to ask “How is my team doing?,” and in updates to come, you will be able to teach Google Assistant more about your preferences.

Read the article below to learn about the full list of features:
https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/08/watch-google-show-off-a-bunch-of-new-assistant-features-coming-soon/

Do you remember a homework tracking bot built by 14-year old kid?

Yep, it was #botoftheweek once.

And it’s again here.

It’s... been acquired 😲

Yep, a chatbot built by 14-year old has been acquired.

Full story is below, it’s insane.

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/the-story-of-getting-acquired-at-age-14-a0171247d991

Awesome news from Slack folks as always 💪🏻

They’re launching a new cool feature called Shared Channels.

It’s new type of channel that connects Slack users from two distinct workspaces.

Two companies can work together as productively as they work with their own team.

In a shared channel, bots are shared too.

If one company installs a bot, both companies in a shared channel can use it to simplify their common workflows.

So, right now you can build an app that solves new use cases specific to cross-company workflows .

 For example handling purchase orders and vendor payments, reviewing and approving proposals, or crafting shared documents.

Opportunities are everywhere 😉

Learn more about the new feature here: https://slackhq.com/introducing-shared-channels-where-you-can-work-with-anyone-in-slack-8c5d2a943f57

Voice, voice, voice! 📢

There have been numerous academic papers and research that shows speech has become robustly more efficient than the classic smartphone keyboard entry modality.

The researchers at Stanford University demonstrated that with modern voice recognition systems, voice has a 3 times higher efficiency when compared to typical typing on a smartphone.

Although this was an impartial academic study, the researchers actually expected that voice would have just a slight advantage.

It turned out that speech recognition has improved to such a degree over text input the researchers were rather shocked by the results.

Voice era is coming, watch the video below to learn more about the study 🤖

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOw4kVrymFs

South Park trolled Amazon Echo owners in the best way possible

This is one of the minor dangers of owning an Amazon Echo.

Most anyone can activate the device by just saying the wake word, including Cartman.

And in the season opener of South Park, that’s exactly what happened.

If someone watched that episode of South Park in the same room as an Echo, their Amazon shopping list was filled with random items, such as scrotum bags, titty chips and big hairy balls 😂

Watch the video below to get the full experience, but be sure to mute your Alexa first: https://twitter.com/MoritzWittmann/status/908319633660416001

A lot of you guys are interested to know what’s the most intelligent AI chatbot out there?

I would definitely say it’s Mitsuku.

I want to talk about that because yesterday it has won the latest Loebner Prize for the third time.

The Loebner Prize is an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awards prizes to the chatbot considered by the judges to be the most human-like.

Mitsuku claims to be an 18-year-old female chatbot, she is a little bit sassy and narcissistic, so it’s a lot of fun to talk to her.

Mitsuku has conversed with millions of people worldwide via the web and other applications.

She was built using AIML programming language and uses keywords for natural language understanding.

She’s based on one of the very first chatbots called Alice that was released in 1995.

Mitsuku contains all of Alice’s AIML files, with many additions from user generated conversations, and is always work in progress.

I really advise you to talk to Mitsuku a little, it’s available on Kik messenger and Mitsuku website, links are below.

Mitsuku Kik: https://bots.directory/kik/entertainment/pandorabots
Mitsuku on Web: http://www.mitsuku.com/

PullString is closing their IDE 😲

Really interesting and kinda shocking piece of news for you today, guys.

One of the most successful conversational platforms PullString has just announced that they’re closing their IDE for text-based applications from December 1, 2017.

“The explosion of voice-first devices, combined with our history in voice-based computer conversation, has led us to devote all our product development efforts towards building the best authoring tools for voice-based skills and applications moving forward”.

Yea, it’s really happening.

Read more about that here: https://www.pullstring.com/blog/pullstrings-voice-first-future

Hey bot makers,

Who likes conferences? I mean, bot conferences? 🤖

I kicked some serious asses to get a 40% discount for ChatbotConf 2017 in Vienna (Oct 17) for our community.

So if you'll have a chance to visit sunny Vienna in October, use the code below to grab the discount.

IMPORTANT: it’s valid till Sep 24, so you have 4 days to make a decision.

PROMO CODE: botfans2017

❤️

I wrote a lot about voice.

Let’s start building.

Here’s an official guide from Brian Donohue that covers all steps of creating a bot for Amazon Alexa.

In this masterpiece, Brian provides the slides with a bit of color so other Alexa enthusiasts would be able to build their own skills.

The guide is 33-pages long (oh, man!) and featured with screenshots and useful links to code samples.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-AOkCqVOaygdf4K3a-nOPyu_YderyAcCgCqqgCAyd-U/edit

P.S. How do you like my new Alexaman suit? :)

Have you seen my yesterday's post about building a skill for Alexa?

Yes, that 33 pages guide which takes 5 hours to go through.

You can do that in 30 seconds without coding.

Here’s a short teaser of something we’re working on right now.

Apple Homepod will be released in December 2017

So, Apple is improving Siri to be able to handle people’s requests via Homepod.

With iOS 11 Siri has gained more than a dozen new features:
1. Syncs across devices
2. On-the-spot translation
3. Personal DJ
4. More expressive voice
5. More personal financial services
6. QR codes for payments and sharing social media accounts
7. Productivity apps and lists
8. Personalized suggestions
9. QuickType
10. AppleWatch with Siri

That’s a really huge update, take a look at the full version notes here: https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/23/ios-11-everything-apple-added-to-siri/

Google is planning to release a new miniature version of its Google Home smart speaker.

At $49, the speaker will compete directly with Amazon’s Echo Dot, which is also sold for about $50.

It comes as no surprise, but price is the number one determinant of why consumers buy a smart speaker.

Like the Echo Dot, the speaker will be plugged into the wall, rather than featuring rechargeable batteries.

Smart and pretty expected move from Google 👍

Their only option with Google Home for 130$ was a pretty big barrier for most of the people in comparison with 49$ price for Echo Dot from Amazon.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/19/google-home-mini-will-reportedly-sell-for-49/

HubSpot acquired Motion.ai

I know that I’m kinda late with this piece of news, but I still want to post it here.

“We see this as the big evolution that’s happening in marketing automation,” HubSpot chief strategy officer Brad Coffey said.

“What email is to marketing automation, we believe messaging is to bots and Motion.ai.”

The Motion.ai platform can currently be used to create bots for Slack and Facebook Messenger, and for chat on websites.

Motion.ai currently offers about a dozen templates for bots that do things like handle FAQs or surveys, but Coffey is particularly interested in improving the handoff between a bot and a human in conversations.

That’s a very interesting case - kinda first acquisition of a bot building platform. More to come.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/20/hubspot-acquires-motion-ai-to-launch-marketing-bot-platform/