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

Last November there was a murder case in Arkansas. What is interesting about it: there was one more “intellect” except people in the house - Amazon Echo. So, police obtained a search warrant for it in the hopes the device would cough up voice evidence to suggest the man had strangled his friend in a hot tub. But Amazon is doubling down on its refusal to turn over voice records from an Echo.

In a new filing in Arkansas state court, Amazon claimed records from the Echo should receive special protection under the First Amendment since what owners say to the device—and the answers its assistant “Alexa” provides—are a form of free expression and these records could reveal information about a person’s health or political views.

https://goo.gl/3ZbxIi

Should Amazon provide these records to police to help find the murder (👍) or not and it's a private information that could not be revealed under any circumstances (👎) ?

Vote below by clicking 👍👎

Discussion is also open in our private chat.

Do you remember Visabot, which helps individuals fill out visa applications and parse immigration law? They are launching a free service to help young undocumented people who are eligible for protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, also known as “dreamers.” The Trump administration has pledged to preserve the DACA program that began under President Obama.

CEO Artem Goldman told that Visabot will provide free services to dreamers to help them legally remain in the United States.

“We’re going to provide some types of visas for free that we believe are important for society, because people who need those visas, like dreamers, usually don’t have money. So we want to help them, especially with this Trump situation. We think it’s important”.

https://goo.gl/wK5PSD

Software developers use a lot of integrated development environments (IDEs) — such as Xcode, Eclipse, or Visual Studio — to develop applications. There are also specialized IDEs for certain fields, such as Unity, Unreal, or Blender for game and VR development.

Guys from PullString think a similar capability is equally important for the evolution of the field of conversational AI: to make it easier to create, debug, and maintain the combination of code and content that’s needed to make conversational agents, or chatbots. So, except from building really amazing and complex bots for their clients, Pullstring also contributes really a lot to the community by writing articles, books, etc. And here is the article about one more thing they’ve built: Conversational IDE called PullString Author. It provides a general conversational editing tool for everyone in the field; one that can be useful to both content creators and software developers alike.

I can’t tell you here about all the features it has, because “we’ve invested more than 50 engineer years of effort to build just such a conversational IDE”, so worth reading the article, these guys are really rocking the bots world 🔥

https://goo.gl/6Hqj5q

Do robots deserve rights?

What shall we do once machines become conscious?

Do we need to grant them rights?

That's really tough questions I can't answer right now, so I don’t want to put a long discussion here even the topic is very interesting though. Here is a nice video discussing all these questions, just watch and think.

https://goo.gl/p6ppUu

Folks from the company which products I genuinely love (Intercom) think a lot about the future of conversations in terms of UI/UX. As you remember I’ve already posted their thoughts about voice interfaces before. And here is one more article from their director of design with 7 reasons why messaging should mirror real conversations. I found a couple of interesting points there and one of them was a thing I deeply believe in - bots in public chats/conversations. I really think it’s the future and the way people will communicate and arrange meetings/order taxi/book tickets together - by inviting different bots into their chat, so they can both control the process and see the message history afterwards.

https://goo.gl/yX40WH

Previous post about Intercom is here.

Super interesting article about the current state of conversational AI and a tendency for people to be disappointed by its capabilities — the expectation of “intelligence” is not being met. Article features a bunch of problems NLP engineers try to solve these days. Have you heard about the Winograd Schema Challenge? If your answer is “no” - it definitely worth reading the article below.

Understanding what’s possible and what isn’t with today’s AI and machine learning capabilities is key for anyone looking to use such technology to build or enhance applications. If you’re not skeptical enough about claims being made about current capabilities, you could waste enormous amounts of time and money trying to do something that can’t (yet) be done.

https://goo.gl/9XDmCe

If after reading yesterday article you’ve decided to learn more about NLP and want to start with basics - here is a tutorial I’ve recently wrote about NLP engine as a service called api.ai. It was recently acquired by Google and provides a conversational platform for natural language processing and allows us to create bots easily. In the tutorial I’ll show you how to create a simple chatbot which understands basic natural language requests and works inside the Facebook Messenger.

https://goo.gl/Yd2Tiv

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

Popular voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant have a major drawback: they can only be connected to a single user account at a time. It’s a big problem, just imagine that you can’t prevent your children from streaming audio and video content that may not be age-appropriate. Also, all searches and recommendations through their interactions will be tied to your account and later you can start to receive some Peppa Pig ads after your children searching for a new episode 🐷

But it looks like Amazon is inching closer to a solution because since 2015, it has been working on Voice ID, a way to distinguish between Alexa users’ voices and correctly identify which member of a household is issuing commands. To achieve this, Alexa will attempt to match the voice it hears with a sample called a ‘voice print’. The feature could potentially make it easier to switch between users’ profiles on the fly and also to set certain functions – like placing orders on Amazon or running home appliances – to require authorization from a specific user.

It’s likely that this feature will gain a huge advantage in the game, as they’ll not only be able to promise more convenience, but also enhanced privacy controls for things like banking, as well as more personalized responses.

https://goo.gl/OfVK9P

In addition to the last post about Voice ID: Amazon debuted a Door Lock API that gives the makers of locks connected to the internet the power to lock or unlock doors with Alexa. The API is part of the Alexa Skills Kit.

“We’re currently working on a variety of security and safety tools within the Door Lock API in order to support unlock controls in a secure manner. We will not launch unlock support until those security requirements and options are in place,” said an Amazon spokesperson.

And again: ability to combine this feature with the Voice ID (distinguish between voices) could improve security for devices that use the Door Lock API to work like a charm🔥

https://goo.gl/OWiZwK

2016 showed us that your bot doesn’t work out if the conversation UX of your bot is bad. That’s why I want to post more about the good examples of conversational UX.

One more great article which was born after analyzing a plenty of user’s conversations with bot. It reveals 2 specific problems users face when they, let’s say want to book a room for 3 nights in San Francisco on Monday:
1. The first mistake developers or product people make is to process each input as a command to trigger an action from the bot. Usually users don’t write one big sentence like “I want to book a room for 3 nights in San Francisco on Monday”, their mind flow produces 3 messages: “I want to book a room”, “I’m in San Francisco, btw”, “I’m thinking about 3 nights on Monday”.
2. The second mistake is not to process typos. Users often do something like: “I want to book on Dec 28”, then “oh shit I meant Dec 27, sorry”. We need to care about it too.

Elegant ways to solve these problems is in the article below.

https://goo.gl/1o1z9J