Will.i.am’s startup raises $117 million to launch a voice assistant

I.am+, the tech startup founded by pop star and entrepreneur will.i.am, has raised $117 million in venture funding to enter the corporate computing market with a voice assistant for customer service.

The company, founded in 2012, initially focused on consumer electronics devices such as headphones.

The new artificial intelligence product, similar to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, marks a sharp departure for the firm, which now employs about 300 people.

Will.i.am said customer support is just the start of Omega.

The plan is to use the technology to build several more enterprise voice AI products.

Voice space is heating quickly 🔥

https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/06/will-i-ams-startup-raises-117-million-and-launches-bot-engine-for-enterprise-market/

This is an absolute game changer! 🔥

In today's Messenger Platform 2.2 updates the Customer Chat plugin was announced.

We've all wanted to extend the Messenger experience to website visitors and now you can.

How does this improve your process?
1. No more asking for an email address to engage with a potential customer with a likely tiny CTR.
2. No need to direct website visitors away from your site via a "Send to Messenger" button to chat with your Messenger bot, potentially never seeing them again.
3. Instantly get access to full name, location, language, profile photo and gender which all can be used to segment and personalise future engagements.
4. Further qualify leads using Facebooks quick replies and rich UI which make it easy and enjoyable for visitors to give you more info about them
5. Hand over warm leads to live agents using Facebook's Handover protocol.
6. Hello open rates of 85% and CTR of 35% when re-engaging website visitors in Messenger.

Congrats the Messenger team and to Chatfuel for being a launch partner for this feature.

https://messenger.fb.com/blog/2-2-release/

Alexa is coming to Japan! 🇯🇵

Amazon announced that Alexa, the brain behind the Amazon Echo, is coming to Japan, along with several Alexa-enabled devices: Amazon Echo, Echo Plus, and Echo Dot. Customers who want to help further the development of Alexa and the Echo family of devices may request an invitation to purchase devices beginning today.

This opens up new opportunities for developers in Japan and around the world. Starting today, you can build for voice with Alexa and reach customers in Japan with the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), the collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation, and code samples. And starting this month, developers can preview all AVS technical documentation and generally available development tools on the Japanese language Developer Portal, and can sign up for the developer preview. Hardware makers are already planning voice-driven experiences for customers in Japan through an invite-only customer preview program including Onkyo P3 speakers, Harman Kardon Allure, and Eufy Genie.

Tens of thousands of developers from around the world have already started developing voice experiences for Alexa. More than 250 skills will be available at launch with Alexa in Japan. Popular Japanese brands are already building skills for Japanese customers including: ALC PRESS INC., All Nippon Airways Co., Ltd., Hitachi, Ltd., JTB Corp., Kansai Electric Power Co., Inc., Nomura Holdings, Inc., The Pokémon Company, Shiseido Japan Co., Ltd., TV Asahi Corporation, ZENSHO HOLDINGS CO., LTD., and others.

https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/0fcba76b-7460-4975-8fad-833996f6a23e/alexa-skills-kit-now-available-in-japan

Facebook Messenger native payments come to UK and France

Facebook Messenger extended its peer-to-peer payment system to millions of users by making payments possible in Euros and British pounds in France and the United Kingdom respectively. 

This is the first time P2P payment is being made available to Facebook Messenger users outside the U.S. since being introduced more than two years ago.

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/11/send-money-to-friends-in-messenger-now-in-euros-and-british-pounds/

Amazon Alexa expands to Japan

Amazon has announced that its smart Echo speakers and voice-activated Alexa digital assistant are now available in Japan by invitation.

Though Amazon was the first of the major tech firms to popularize voice-controlled smart speakers in the U.S., it could face an uphill battle in Japan.

Local tech titan Line recently launched its own version of the Echo, called Clova Wave, and Google introduced Home to Japan a few weeks back.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/08/amazons-alexa-expands-beyond-english-and-german-into-japanese-as-the-echo-launches-in-japan/

ManyChat changes the way of building chatbots 🔥

A couple of weeks ago they’ve released really revolutionary thing - a new way to build your bots that makes the process faster, easier and gives you – the bot builder – more power.

It’s called Flow Builder.

Flow Builder is a visual map of all the messages, actions and transitions between them.

It gives you a birds-eye view of the whole interaction without having to switch between single messages.

A single flow consists of Steps (like sending a message or performing actions) and connections between them.

A flow begins with a starting step which has a green "Starting Step" badge on top and then progresses step-by-step depending on user's actions.

Of course all the other platforms like MotionAI and others have a flow builder for a while already, but it’s a really new level.

Be sure to check it out, it’s a truly new ManyChat at all.

http://flowbuilder.manychat.com

BBC releases its first Alexa-powered interactive audio drama

The BBC has a rich history in radio, after having been founded as a wireless broadcaster back in the 1920s. 

But now, the corporation is embracing the world of interactive audio stories with the release of The Inspection Chamber, a sci-fi comedy drama that you use your voice to participate in. 

The experience has been developed by the BBC's R&D department alongside Rosina Sound.

The experience can be downloaded from the Alexa Skill Store or the BBC Taster website, at which point you'll be able to play along as a fourth character. 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0774XFXLZ/

Amazon's Alexa and Prime Music service arrive in Canada

Amazon will start pre-selling the Echo, Echo Plus and Echo Dot in Canada today for
the introductory prices of CAD $100, $170 and $70, respectively. Shipping will start
by December 5th, and Alexa will presumably be available at that point. Prime Music
is available today with a Prime membership.

Amazon has introduced a new English voice for Alexa with a Canadian accent,
though even we Canadians aren't exactly sure what that is. However, Alexa doesn't
seem to be available yet in French, which is bit surprising considering that it's one
of Canada's two official languages.

https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/15/amazon-alexa-prime-music-canada/

Manychat guys are on fire 🔥

Two days ago I was talking about their new revolutionary Flow Builder thing and here is a new cool stuff from these guys.

They’ve released a holy grail for marketers - “The Ultimate Guide To Messenger Marketing and Facebook
Chatbots”.

This guide was created to answer all of the unanswered questions you have about Messenger Marketing 📘

This is the most comprehensive piece of content on the web about Facebook chatbots… print it out, study it, and share with your friends!

In this guide, you’ll learn how to:
- Grow Your Business with Messenger Marketing
- Get Facebook Messenger Subscribers
- Send Messages to Your Subscribers
- Automate Your Messenger Marketing With Chatbots
- Use ManyChat
- Integrate ManyChat with Zapier
- Create a Messenger Ad Inside of Facebook
- Create Destination Ads
- Send a Sponsored Message
- Nurture Leads inside of Messenger
- Deliver Content
- Deploy Retargeting
- Drive More Sales
- Case Studies…. and more!! 😳

Enjoy 6,000+ words of juicy Facebook chatbot goodness 🍫🍩🍰

https://blog.manychat.com/ultimate-guide-messenger-marketing-and-facebook-chatbots/

Hey folks, most of you already know that we have the biggest knowledge base about bots - awesome-bots.

It has just passed 1000 stars and continue growing! ⭐️

It’s been a while since the last huge update there, so if you’ve built something cool during this time - feel free to drop me a message (@maximabramchuk) or just go straight and open a pull request on Github.

Thanks!

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

Google’s Chatbase is finally launching to public!

Most of you have probably heard or already used chatbot analytics service by Google called Chatbase.

But I personally spent about a month waiting for my request approval before I get access to it.

Now these problems are gone and the platform is open and free for everyone.

The idea behind Chatbase’s cloud service is to offer tools to more easily analyze and optimize chatbots.

This includes giving bot builders the ability to understand what works to increase customer conversions, improve the bot’s accuracy, and create a better user experience.

The system today integrates with any voice or text messaging platform, Google says, including Facebook, Kik, Viber, Slack, WhatsApp, WeChat, Alexa, Cortana, Allo, Line, Skype, Twitter, and more.

Beyond bot analytics, the tool leverages Google’s machine learning capabilities to figure out what sort of problems could be affecting the bot.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/16/googles-chatbot-analytics-platform-chatbase-launches-to-public/

Time to build apps for Google Home

Google Assistant received some major upgrades in recent days to help developers make voice apps that interact with Google’s AI assistant.

Upgrades include more expressive voices, ability to send push notifications and many more.

Beyond push notifications, voice apps can now deliver daily updates or notifications about certain kinds of content.

Also, on Monday, Google announced that Home speakers can now be used as an intercom system.

All of these features are already around on Amazon Alexa for a couple of months, so Google is still behind in this race.

More info about the updates is in the article below.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/15/google-gives-developers-more-tools-to-make-better-voice-apps/

Chatbot that can trick email scammers

Talking to chatbots is usually a waste of time, so why not have them waste someone else’s instead?

Better yet: why not have them waste an email scammer’s time.

That’s the premise behind Re:scam, an email chatbot operated by New Zealand cybersecurity firm Netsafe.

Next time you get a dodgy email in your inbox, says Netsafe, forward it on to me@rescam.org, and a proxy email address will start replying to the scammer for you, doing its very utmost to waste their time.

Open the article below to see a few sample dialogues, they’re hilarious.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/10/16632724/scam-chatbot-ai-email-rescam-netsafe

I'm sure you have already seen new Messenger feature - Customer Chat Plugin.

Here's a great example of how you can use it with your bot to drive leads to your Messenger channel:
https://www.jonloomer.com/2017/11/07/facebook-messenger-customer-chat-plugin/

Creating voice bots is hard.

Creating good voice bots is super hard.

There are 16,000 Alexa skills with 0 reviews.

They are Zombies.

People never get back to them.

The way to avoid it is to precisely understand the use case for the voice bot you’re building.

To come up with some ideas, I went through top Alexa skills and read all the user reviews.

And I learned a ton of stuff.

Read my article below to understand what makes a voice bot stand out.

https://medium.com/storyline-blog/what-i-learned-from-5000-reviews-of-top-5-alexa-skills-82aa54b5fc15

Dialogflow is launching API v2 and Enterprise edition

Since Google has acquired api.ai (now called Dialogflow) a long time ago, it remained completely free and hasn’t even had any pricing information anywhere on their website.

But many of their clients have asked for enterprise support, and today they’re launching Dialogflow Enterprise Edition.

Also, they’re releasing API v2 which is the next iteration of their developer API adding new features and capabilities, integration with Google Cloud Speech and many more.

Read more about the update in their article below.

https://blog.dialogflow.com/post/dialogflow-api-v2-and-enterprise-edition/

Messenger now allows sellers to invoice buyers through PayPal’s new chat extension

The feature is ideal for use with Facebook’s numerous Buy and Sell groups as well as Facebook Marketplace, in addition to being an easy way to send PayPal invoices in general.

This time, the focus is on shifting small business transactions and those between buyers and sellers into Messenger.

That leaves room for a product like PayPal’s to aid with transactions, given Facebook’s lack of interest in building out a payments business itself.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/21/sellers-can-now-invoice-buyers-through-paypals-new-chat-extension-for-messenger/

The world's first headphones to equip artificial intelligence

Did you see the “Her” movie? It is impressive, isn’t it, but not real, science fiction. Hmm, the voice part of the puzzle is already here: Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana, Sire etc. We need the head phones part for voice first UX from the “Her” movie.

Welcome to the future!

‘vinci 2.0’ are the world’s first smart headphones to feature a built-in AI (artificial intelligence) assistant that utilizes biosensing hardware and neural network learning algorithms. this means that whenever users listen to music and make voice commands, it collects and analyses data, such as heart rate and location, in order to familiarize and predict their preferences. with this, the in-ear device has 3G cellular, music streaming, voice assistant, health sensors and fitness coaching under its control.

https://www.designboom.com/technology/vinci-2-0-headphones-artificial-intelligence-11-25-2017/

Amazon is launching a lot of AI services

On Wednesday at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced one new AI service after another.

The new tools do things like measure sentiment, track people in video feeds, and translate languages, among other things.

The most interesting one for us, bot builders, is Amazon Comprehend - service can pick up on positive or negative sentiment and specific people, places, and phrases in the text.

You can check it out below.

It's a great alternative to all those stuff from Google and Facebook.

https://aws.amazon.com/comprehend/

Amazon is putting Alexa in the office

At the AWS reinvent conference, Amazon announced Alexa for Business.

The new platform will let companies build out their own skills and integrations for both practical and business use cases.

The first focus for Alexa for Business is conference room.

Just as developers can build skills for Amazon Echo users, businesses can now build out Alexa skills for use within their own company.

You could imagine voice access to an employee directory, Salesforce data on various clients and accounts, or company calendar information.

Alexa for Business is a two-sided project for Amazon.

On the one hand, Amazon gets added data and revenue from larger-scale customers and, on the other, enterprise businesses will likely hop on the platform to build APIs and skills for a new breed of customer.

But the first challenge is getting large companies to invest in a huge quantity of Echo devices.

Given the shift toward voice interfaces, it’s likely not a question of if, but when.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/30/16720138/amazon-alexa-business-announcement

Amazon has finally released Alexa Gadgets

Alexa Gadgets are a new category of connected products and developer tools for building fun, interactive experiences.

Voice is the new gaming frontier.

Pioneers of voice games are reimagining a whole new way to engage players, feeding their curiosity with new ways to play—including interactive adventures, family friendly games, quiz games, and so much more.

Right now it’s even more interesting to build games for Alexa.

Here is a short video on how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA20rRVfe1Y

More information: https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit/gaming