Today we decided to make a small digest of what happened for the last two days.

Facebook is on fire! FB decided to show the world a piece of information regarding its own speech recognition feature "Aloha" for Facebook and Messenger apps: https://voicebot.ai/2018/08/21/first-sighting-of-the-facebook-aloha-voice-assistant-appears-in-messenger-along-with-voice-messaging-in-instagram/

Maybe new Alexa competitor? What do you think?

Google Assistant’s latest feature delivers just the ‘good news’😇 Just say "Hey Google, tell me something good" to receive your daily dose of stories about people who are solving real-life problems: https://www.blog.google/products/assistant/hey-google-tell-me-something-good/

And one more news related to Facebook:
Facebook’s advertising platform permits discrimination by removing 5,000 options that can be used to exclude certain religious and ethnic minority groups: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/21/facebook-is-removing-over-5000-ad-targeting-options-to-prevent-discriminatory-ads/

A few weeks ago, our friend Julian from CognitionX shared his research in chatbots and voice bots market.
Highly recommend to read it🤓

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Kfo-w7BlE0a0AYAZ7Lm_qNJv_UNkRLzc/view

Have you seen this cute puppy?

I'm sure, pretty soon this nice animals like Aibo will receive lots of features characteristic to voice assistants and will become very popular within the next 5 years.

https://tcrn.ch/2Lo8IUD

Would you buy Google Assistant for $2000? Or maybe Alexa for $400?
Here are two articles about interesting collaboration Amazon and Google with producers of musical equipment

Google
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/23/bang-olufsens-pricey-beosound-line-gets-google-assistant/

Amazon
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/8/28/17790932/bose-home-speaker-500-soundbar-700-announced-pricing-features

Samsung is opening up Bixby to third-party developers this November

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/04/samsung-bixby-software-developers-kit-sdk.html

btw, a month ago Samsung announced their first home speaker powered by Bixby.

https://thenextweb.com/tech/2018/08/09/samsung-debuts-its-funky-galaxy-home-bixby-powered-speaker/

Have you ever seen how people beg in China?
You just need to scan the QR code and choose the amount of money you want to transfer.

Excuses like "I don't have cash" don't work anymore😐

Alexa is going to become a Kinect replacement for Xbox One.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/6/17826718/microsoft-xbox-one-alexa-features-support-voice-control

We saw the news about voice interface in VR games before, but consoles like Xbox are brand new field for voice.

Just remembered Skyrim promo video for E3.

Maybe it wasn't a joke at all?

This beautiful map shows everything that powers an Amazon Echo, from data mines to lakes of lithium

https://anatomyof.ai/

Google Home Mini became the best-selling smart speaker👑

Google sold 2.3 million Home mini devices in Q2 2018, according to a new report from Strategy Analytics. Amazon sold 2.2 Echo dots for the same period of time.

Last year the situation was completely different!

More stats in the article below

https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/19/google-home-mini-was-the-best-selling-smart-speaker-in-q2/

Yesterday Salesforce announced Einstein Voice. The main goal of this extension is to translate voice to text and log that information into Salesforce. This will save a huge amount of time when you need to manually fill the form.

In addition to the Voice Assistant, Salesforce announced that customers can build their own voice bots on the Einstein Bot Platform. Einstein Voice Bots will be in open pilot in June 2019.

https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-einstein-voice-ai-assistant-2018-9

Love this news😇😇

Small startup from London made an AI-powered chatbot and raised $10M series A.

The bot named Cleo and his goal is to replace your banking app. Just four months after the launch Cleo claiming more than 600,000 active users in the U.K., U.S. and Canada in total + it is adding 30,000 new signups each week.

Here is the bot: http://m.me/1027621033925129

https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/20/cleo-meet-balderton/

This week Facebook will announce their first smart speaker.

It will be powered by ALEXA👑🔥

https://voicebot.ai/2018/09/24/facebook-portal-smart-display-to-be-announced-this-week-will-have-alexa-onboard/

We found a 💎

Deakin University develops digital assistant which can answer 6 000 questions! They working on it since 2014 and the aim is to automate 20 000 questions!

Study case: http://www.umsl.edu/~lacitym/LSEOUWP1704.pdf

Assistant overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsRPuU53E74

📢Berlin is going to host the biggest conference about bots next month, called Chatbot Summit.

We decided to summarize 5 reasons why you should take part in it:
1. There is going to be the biggest concentration of people from the sphere.
2. Lots of useful insights and discussions about trends in 2019. Knowledge = money!
3. You can personally meet the leaders of such companies as Smooch, Chatbase, Twilio, Botsociety and many others.
4. Sharing knowledge with people from your sphere, drinking tasty German beer! What can be better than this? 🍻☺️
5. Meet the BotCube team! Yes, we're also going to Berlin and we will be glad to see you there too 😉

You can find more information on the conference website https://www.chatbotsummit.com/

Use the promo code "Botcube15" to get a 15% discount on tickets.

An amazing guide from Kayla Matthews of how to promote your bot🤖

She highlighted six steps which you have to follow in order to succeed.

1. Test the Product First
2. Create a Story
3. Add Bot to Your Website
4. Use Existing Social Media Tools
5. Make Bot Easy to Share
6. Avoid Ad Fraud

There are interesting thoughts about frauds in advertisement. We made similar mistakes during the advertisement of the bot in Telegram channels.

⌚️4 min read (short one)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/how-to-promote-your-bot-on-a-budget-b2f30df0fac6

Hey folks! I’m Vasili, one of the co-founders @ Storyline. We’ve built a visual tool for making Alexa skills, which powers 8% of the skills store already (over 4,000 skills).

We’re surveying Amazon Echo users to figure out both your general impression of Alexa and tiny details that need to be improved. It will help us to understand & fix the most critical pain points in thousands of Alexa skills out there to make your future Alexa experience better.

Thanks in advance! 🙌

https://goo.gl/forms/RSw4A5T6DY1UiCjf2

We got news from Instagram!📸

Just a few minutes ago Instagram has started to accept beta sign-ups for Spark AR. If chosen, you'll be among the first to use Spark AR Studio to create and share beautiful AR experiences on Instagram. Get started now! http://bit.ly/2Pbb4sz

Facebook has released their first home speakers🤖

There are two devices:

1) Portal with 10.1" display for 199$
2) Portal+ with 15.6" display for 349$

Both of them are powered by Alexa

https://portal.facebook.com/

A year ago Yandex released Alice, Alexa- like assistant that speaks Russian.
It was released as a part of the browser application and now became the most popular voice assistant in Russia!

Happy birthday, Alice🎉🎉🎉

More information about Alice you can find at the link below
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/yandex-app-attack/

Hello guys,
We came to Berlin to attend Chatbot Summit. If you are here as well, send me a direct message (@andreibandarenka), would love to meet you!