It’s Sunday evening here, so it’s time for #botoftheweek nomination.

This week I’ve found an interesting bot that can tell you a name of a plant. Just take a photo of any plant and send it to the bot, it will identify the plant for you in just one second. It is backed by a customized deep learning algorithm with tons of data and tuning for plants. And I can say it’s pretty accurate.

Screenshot: https://goo.gl/vyhnRM

Bot is here to check: https://goo.gl/uAhKVx

Hey folks, I think that one way connection with you is too boring, because I don’t get feedback from you, so I decided to create a public chat where we can discuss a huge amount of bot stuff, like messaging apps, conversational interfaces, AI, ML and much more! Chat language is English, so feel free to join and share it with your friends if they are interested in bots!

https://news.1rj.ru/str/joinchat/AAAAAEIJ70FNIceDnr0WIg - JOIN HERE
https://news.1rj.ru/str/joinchat/AAAAAEIJ70FNIceDnr0WIg - JOIN HERE
https://news.1rj.ru/str/joinchat/AAAAAEIJ70FNIceDnr0WIg - JOIN HERE

Chat cover photo

While working on our last bot, we were kinda surprised that users don’t always click buttons when they see buttons, don’t always respond in text when they see a question, but they tend to interact more with visual content like stickers, images, gifs etc.

Here is an interesting from Dashbot, they’ve processed almost 700 million messages through their platform and analyzed them to find a percentage of text, images, stickers and other types of messages. They’ve also processed all the images through the Amazon’s Rekognition API to find out what was pictured on them. Very interesting statistics to look through.

https://goo.gl/A4Vc32

News from the messengers side: Amazon unveils Chime, looks to reinvent the conference call with new Skype and GoToMeeting competitor. Pricing starts at $2.50 per user per month on the lowest end, with a higher tier plan of $15 per user which includes video and screen-sharing among other features. There is a basic option available for free but that is limited to video calls and chat rooms between two users.

Maxim keeps fingers crossed while dreaming about death of Skype 🙏🏻

https://goo.gl/GFGGwS

When designing a product for the web or mobile world, we usually operate within certain types of interactions and user interface elements — text fields, forms, buttons, checkboxes, or switches, for example. In the chatbot world, the interface elements are different.

I found a very interesting article, especially for bot novices, about all Facebook chatbot interactions. It has a very comprehensive and huge pdf with a visual summary of all the interaction elements that are now available for the Facebook Messenger bot. It’ll save you at least a couple of hours.

Article: https://goo.gl/G1MYQ2
Link to the pdf directly: https://goo.gl/GlngeY

Long read about AI today (it's not new, but worth sharing): Apple gave Steven Levy an inside look at some of its deep learning and artificial intelligence work. Apple is said to have many people working on AI across various company initiatives. Of course much of the work is highly secretive, but some of it is already reflected in current iOS features—and not just Siri.

If you're not available to read it today, just add to the Pocket to come back to it later at weekend ;)

https://goo.gl/75agTq

Have you even been dreaming about your chatbot getting featured on Facebook? It could be a total disaster if you’re not prepared!

Here is an article from team behind Nerdify bot about their experience in being featured which costed them a couple of sleepless nights :)

https://goo.gl/uJgNcR

Have your bot ever been featured? Tell us here.

It’s always been obvious for most of people that robots will take over different routine tasks of our daily lives, freeing us to work on more creative stuff. But, surprisingly, some of the easiest tasks to automate turn out to be creative ones (art, science/research, legal, policing/security) and many of the monotonous jobs we’d really like to automate are proving very tricky (cleaning, clothing, farming). Have you ever been thinking about this?

https://goo.gl/a6Tltr

Do you remember my post about decision trees vs web views? But what if there’s a much better way?

Here is a concept of building conversational experience called Random Access Navigation. It’s main idea to give people the ability to navigate without a defined path, while also being able to change their mind at any time. R.A.N. offers more than one solution for the most common bot criticism: fixed decision trees (everybody hates them).

Very interesting concept for bot builders.

Article: https://goo.gl/J7aRyp

Decision trees vs web views

Seattle-based company ReplyYes announced a $6.5 million round of funding focused on building a platform for mobile commerce via messaging services. Previously they were selling vinyl records through messengers and now they are going to expand because they keep seeing “a lot of interest” from lifestyle brands, tickets and events, apps/games, and some categories of consumables.

The company has enabled commerce over Facebook Messenger and SMS right now, and will be looking to enable more platforms in the future. Payment is built into the platform, as is shipping.

https://goo.gl/haoqRu

When we use Google to search for a movie to watch or for a product to buy we are presented with a whole bunch of ads. And it seems normal to us. But when we ask Amazon Alexa of Google Home to search the same thing for you, no such ads exist. Yet.

And it’s a great opportunity and a big challenge for advertisers at the same time. Because ads on these devices can’t be such dumb and straightforward as we see across the web. Your personal home assistant knows much more about you than your browser does. So, it must offer much more native and smart ads. And it already can. There is a plenty of use cases: knowing that it’s raining in the morning, perhaps it will offer to call you an Uber; 30 minutes before the Super Bowl starts, it may play an ad for Budweiser; when you ask when a movie is playing, it will not only tell you the time, but also offer a discount from the closest theater on the next showing.

As for me, I think that in future manufacturers of voice-enabled devices such as Amazon and Google will start to offer ad-supported versions of Echo and Home for free. A premium, ad-free version would certainly be possible. It’s pretty similar to the monetization model of big China brand LeEco which sells TVs with 90% discount but gains revenue from included TV services subnoscriptions and ads.

What do you think about future of voice assistants? I’m always ready to discuss with you in our public chat.

https://goo.gl/nxrglk

Will you take an ads-supported Google Home/Amazon Echo for free?

We have a very special bot for today’s #botoftheweek nomination. It is made by a 14-year old kid. Yep. His name is Alec by the way.

It’s a Facebook Messenger bot that keeps track of your homework. Alec was tired of trying to remember to write down his homework or enter it in a task app, so he wanted someone to keep track of it all for him. So, he created a Christopher Bot.

Christopher Bot asks you what homework you were assigned at the end of every class. Then at the end of the day, he texts you a list of all the homework from your day (and displays it on a webpage for the entire week). He texts you Monday to Friday at whatever time your classes end. He can send you a list of commands. He pauses when you're on vacation, and then he resumes when you get back.

It’s super awesome that nowadays more and more kids start coding early and as a result launch great products. Basically, when I was 14, my main activity was to chase that dog in a street or to climb to the top of that tree to throw apples into my neighbour’s yard 😫

Check the bot here: https://goo.gl/jIMbnc

Robots are taking human jobs. But Bill Gates believes that governments should tax companies’ use of them, as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment.

It’s a striking position from the world’s richest man and a self-described techno-optimist who co-founded Microsoft, one of the leading players in artificial-intelligence technology.

Gates argues that these taxes, paid by a robot’s owners or makers, would be used to help fund labor force retraining. Former factory workers, drivers, and cashiers would be transitioned to health services, education, or other fields where human workers will remain vital.

Watch Gates explain why and how we should tax robots in the video below: https://goo.gl/Gyt1K1

Read the whole interview: https://goo.gl/x01L32

There was a long time here without news about messengers though, but here it is: after long tests Facebook introduces an encrypted Snapchat Stories clone into WhatsApp. Let me remind you that previously the same feature was introduced in Instagram. And I also saw a lot of screenshots with Facebook Stories also (yep, in the main app), this feature is in test right now. Pretty interesting things are going on here between Facebook and Snap.

I’ve been listening to a couple of podcasts lately about all this “story with Stories” and Snap’s IPO. What I’ve understood from there is that basically a lot of people from industry are starting to think that Snapchat can follow Twitter’s fate. If you’re interested - link to the podcast is below.

But let’s just forget about all these discussions, predictions and “expert thoughts”, better take some popcorn and watch this exciting show :)

https://goo.gl/7waJxm

Podcast: https://goo.gl/A5r6h1

Will Facebook kill Snapchat from the social media game in 5 years? (vote below by clicking 👍👎)

If you want to discuss this topic - feel free to join our public chat

The bot ecosystem is maturing, and larger organizations are starting to adopt communication platforms that let bots take part in enterprise workflows. There is a growing opportunity for bot builders to move their user bases from early adopters to big enterprises. But the opportunity to capture big clients comes with complexity: From stringent policies and security requirements to longer procurement processes and larger scale workflows. In the article below Amir Shevat shares some things to consider if you want to build bots or apps for some of the world’s biggest companies.

https://goo.gl/G8zVkV

Let me share with you guys an article we’ve just posted in our company’s blog. Basically it’s our CEO thoughts about why businesses need chatbots and messenger apps.

First hype about chatbots is over and now we have to estimate how market is changing and where it goes. What are chatbots? A revolution? A necessity? Or a trendy toy? Let's discuss!

Article: https://goo.gl/gSxfeb

Any feedback about the article is highly appreciated in our public chat. And also, thanks for sharing!

Recently (about 2 months ago), chat app Viber stepped into the field of bots and released their own bot platform to connect businesses with customers on their platform. And while we’ve already started to build a very first Viber bot for one of our clients they are going further and announcing a new in-chat “Instant shopping” feature that lets users search for goods without leaving Viber.

The launch will include Rakuten.com — the ecommerce marketplace formerly known as Buy.com, which was acquired by Japanese tech titan Rakuten in 2010. You may remember that Rakuten has been the owner of Viber since its $900 million acquisition in 2014, so this sheds some light on how Rakuten is looking to cross-pollinate its services.

Great move into a growing push to connect companies with consumers. Now, with in-chat shopping, another piece of Viber’s monetization puzzle is in place.

https://goo.gl/wUVVDe