Do you remember my long post about ads for voice assistants? According to the poll I’ve made - about 70% of this channel readers were against taking an ads-supported Google Home/Amazon Echo for free. But I have a very interesting piece of news for you: some Google Home owners reported hearing something extra when they asked for a summary of the day ahead from the smart speaker: an advertisement for the opening of Beauty and the Beast.

But Google denied that the audio snippet was actually an ad, initially providing this rather strange statement: “This isn't an ad; the beauty in the Assistant is that it invites our partners to be our guest and share their tales.”

So, while ads on connected speakers feel like a deal breaker right now, they’re probably going to become the norm pretty soon.

http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/3/16/14948696/google-home-assistant-advertising-beauty-and-the-beast

It's Sunday, so it's time for our #botoftheweek nomination!

And today it goes to @meet bot by Google!. They've just released a new app called Hangouts Chat, basically it's just a new chat app on top of current Google infrastructure for business (which is actually pretty cool).

Straight to the point: on top of it they have a bot called @meet, that understands natural language and can make appointments right in the chat. So let's say you and your team are talking about a brainstorm session next week to get some shit done. Usually, everyone starts looking at their calendars trying to find good time for a meeting, and it's kinda suck. With this new bot, you can tag @meet right in the conversation, and the bot will look at everyone's schedule and pick the best time and arrange the meeting. Sounds extremely cool! 🤖 ❤️

http://www.inc.com/john-brandon/how-this-simple-little-bot-in-googles-new-slack-killer-will-change-your-work-lif.html

I’ve recently found some interesting statistics data about people using a bot. But it’s not just a simple bot, it’s a Hipster Cat Bot and it has recently surpassed 100 thousands users 😳

There is a couple of interesting metrics inside: from different time graphs showing how people chat to a bot (for example only a few people chat during work hours) to that fact that Telegram users don’t really use this bot, they are more into dogs 🐶

https://medium.com/@electrobabe/5-fun-facts-about-100-000-users-chatting-with-a-cat-bd767b9a4d16

By the way this bot was built using Microsoft Bot Framework. It’s interesting that I start seeing more and more bots been built using this tool, it makes me start thinking about giving it a try. Have you used Microsoft Bot Framework or BotKit? Any obstacles? I’m curious - tell me here please.

Surprising news - Andrew Ng, chief data scientist at Baidu, today announced that he will be leaving the company.

“Baidu’s AI is incredibly strong, and the team is stacked up and down with talent; I am confident AI at Baidu will continue to flourish,” Ng wrote in a Medium post. “After Baidu, I am excited to continue working toward the AI transformation of our society and the use of AI to make life better for everyone.”

It’s not clear who at Baidu will take Ng’s noscript of chief scientist.

http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/21/baidu-chief-scientist-andrew-ng-is-stepping-down-haifeng-wang-will-lead-expanded-ai-group/

Do you remember I shared an article about reactions in Messenger last week? Here's a huuuge update: they just released Message Reactions and Mentions for Messenger!

Now you can react to any message by pressing​ and holding​ any message, and then tapping to make your selection from the Facebook emojis. I suppose it's a new way to improve their ML and especially M.

More interesting feature is group mentions. Instead of simply seeing that someone responded in the conversation, users will receive a new kind of notification that lets them know they were called out specifically. Hoping that mentions offer a way to incorporate bots into group threads!
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/03/introducing-message-reactions-and-mentions-for-messenger/

Sunday evening is always a great time for 2 things: planning the next week and reading about the #botoftheweek nomination. We have a very controversial bot today. I can’t say that it’s useful at all. It can be even harmful for your time. But it’s a very loud case though. So, it’s a Kim Kardashian’s chatbot promoting her mobile game 🙈

https://venturebeat.com/2017/03/23/kim-kardashian-launches-a-facebook-messenger-bot-to-promote-her-mobile-game/

Hey, guys, do you remember the list of bot resources we’ve recently collected?

Finally, we've been hunted on Product Hunt today! Right now we really need your help to spread the word about it. 💪🏻

So, please, follow the link below, find 'awesome-bots' and click the “Upvote” button

Thanks in advance! ✋🏻

https://www.producthunt.com/topics/bots?order=by-date

A week ago Chris Messina had a webinar called "The future of messaging bots and chat for business". I really enjoyed watching the video noscript and I hope that it would be helpful for you too! Yesterday he wrote a great wrap-up with best thoughts and insights and I'm 100% sure it would help everyone to refresh their knowledge base and get some useful insights! 🤖 ❤️

Hint: at the end of the post you can find an example of best use case for group bots I've seen till the moment. 😉

https://medium.com/chris-messina/the-future-of-messaging-bots-and-chat-for-business-54b94380ffb7

Seems like a long-waited feature is finally coming to Facebook - group chatbots. Facebook will reveal at its F8 conference a new class of bots that work inside Messenger group chats 😍

I really like this update because from my perspective there is a plenty of cases where it can be useful. For example, a Messenger group of football fans could add a sports bot to their thread, where it could report score changes, big plays and other news from the game. An e-commerce group bot could keep a group of coworkers informed about the status of their lunch delivery, letting them know that the order is being prepared and when it arrives.

And the main point here - since these group bots won’t be the sole conversation partner, there will be less pressure on them to act human, and more opportunity for them to service a specific utility.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/29/facebook-group-bots/

Robots… Robots everywhere.

Pizza giant Domino’s has announced a pilot program in a couple of German and Dutch cities, where customers within a 1-mile radius of certain Domino’s stores will be greeted with a non-humanoid robot rather than a person on a bike 🤖

The main reason of such a drastic experiment can be explained by the quote of Domino’s CEO: “With our growth plans over the next five to 10 years, we simply won’t have enough delivery drivers if we do not look to add to our fleet through initiatives such as this.”

https://venturebeat.com/2017/03/29/dominos-taps-starship-technologies-to-deliver-pizzas-with-autonomous-ground-drones/

I have a really cool chatbot for #botoftheweek nomination today. I think this is a great example of how we should solve problems. Start, investigate and do, even if you have to work full-time. 🤖 ❤️

When it comes to choosing a place to go, most people ask their friends or influencers who they can relate to. Sure is a Facebook Messenger chatbot for the most Instagrammed food & drink spots near you. Simple as that. I highly recommend you to read the full article because the story here matters. The bot currently operates in 22 cities like SF, LA, London and Berlin, so go check the list of available cities and try it! 🙂
https://blog.surebot.io/launching-sure-5e695380c8bc

Hey everyone, Vasili from BotCube is here! I'll help Maxim to curate & share more awesome content about bots 🤖 ❤️

A friend of mine Paul Boutin from Chatbots Magazine recently wrote a great piece of content about natural language processing in chatbots. Do bots require NLP at all? Actually it's a very tough question, because current state of tech doesn't allow you to easily build conversational logic without making a ton of intents and most NLP bots (even from giants) still suck.

From my perspective, the best solution is to build mixed interfaces: integrate NLP where needed and add buttons & structured messages for actionable items. I also shared some thoughts in this article how chat helps to create trust in banking bots so be sure to check it out 😉

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/does-a-bot-need-natural-language-processing-c2f76ab7ef11

Seems like Twitter is going hard on bots! 🤖

Yesterday they opened a brand new Twitter DM API platform to allow everyone to build bots on Twitter. Actually, it's a huge step forward for Twitter platform. These APIs are very well-designed and could assist a lot of Twitter-first businesses to connect with their customers at scale.

Yesterday's release includes A LOT of features, and most of them are simply copied from Facebook (welcome message, get started, location, buttons). That's why I'd like to highlight the most interesting ones here:
1) Custom profiles allow developers to override the default avatar and name attached to a given message. This is extremely cool because you can show who's writing: human or bot 👦 🤖
2) Customer feedback cards allows businesses to collect feedback on the experiences they provide on Twitter, it's kinda special cards for feedback purposes only. Nice idea, very similar to reactions on Messenger 👍

So go check out the APIs and build some cool bots on Twitter!

https://blog.twitter.com/2017/new-apis-to-power-the-future-of-customer-engagement-in-direct-messages

Today I have a pretty new chatbot for #botoftheweek. First time it comes from big brand - TripAdvisor. Basically it's a discovery chatbot in Facebook Messenger that allows you to search for recommendations by narrowing down the options and providing you with the best results.

I highly recommend you to listen to podcast interview with Jeff Chow, VP Product @ TripAdvisor to gather some insights about this project and how big brands are going on chatbots. Hint: chatbots has always been very interesting to TripAdvisor as a company and they plan even more projects on this field! 🤖 🚀

https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2017/04/06/tripadvisors-lessons-learned-from-building-a-chatbot/#231eda5a6f37

Podcast direct link: http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/3/b/5/3b54676497471444/Jeff_Chow_Podcast_DONE.mp3?c_id=14810169&expiration=1491774416&hwt=9062751abe083830beaf6a0d1856f550

Facebook Messenger team has just finally released a new feature I’ve been waiting for a long time - group payments.

Splitting the bill, concert tickets, a present for a friend, lodging for a trip, or whatever needs to be settled in a group is now easier than ever. And you can do it right in the very place you're already using to make group plans - in the chat! Just select people, amount of money to be charged and what is it for (“pizza”, “cinema tickets”) - that’s it. Your friends can easily pay via PayPal. Huge kudos to FB Messenger team 💪🏻

https://www.facebook.com/davidm/videos/vb.800665194/10158676691550195/?type=2&theater

Do you remember that story from SuperBowl when some ad accidentally triggered all the Google Homes by saying “OK Google”? 🤔

At that moment I said that it’s just a beginning of a great game/war when ads creators will abuse “OK Google” phrase to promote their products. Here it is: the 15-second ad features someone in a Burger King uniform leaning into the camera before saying, “OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?”. For anyone with a Google Home near their TV, that strangely phrased request will prompt the speaker to begin reading Google Home’s explanation for the Whopper 🍔

But except from the accident itself there’s the bigger problem: Google gets its explanation of the Whopper from Wikipedia. And as we all know, anyone’s free to edit Wikipedia.

You can easily modify the Whopper entry briefly, and Google Home began speaking the updated text only minutes later. With this ad airing nationally, Burger King is opening the door for an editing war — and it risks having a malicious editor make the Google Home say something inappropriate when explaining the Whopper.

That’s 2017, yep 😕

https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/12/15259400/burger-king-google-home-ad-wikipedia

This week's #botoftheweek comes from our good friends from VentureBeat. Basically it's a typical news bot, but there's a cool feature that sets it apart from tons of other bots - built-in learning. 🤖

This bot observes your behaviour and constantly updates your profile to make sure you get the most personalized news. How do they do that? User's profile consists of keywords and meta-tags from the stories he reads. As user reads the stories, the keywords and tags are aggregated (more frequent keywords have a higher score) and normalized (all scores are adjusted to add up to a 100%). As a result it shows relative weights of different attributes, which you can fine-tune through the webview. Super cool, isn't it? ❤️

If you like, you can also add explicit categories to improve the personalization. What’s more, you can stop and start profile tracking at any time, leaving you in complete control. Great job, VB!

https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/13/venturebeats-personalized-news-bot-is-now-available-on-messenger/

I think that most of you have probably heard about Burger 🍔 King provocative ad triggering Google Home (if not - link is below). It makes people wonder — in what other ways could voicebots become more annoying over time (or even dangerous)? In the article below you can find 5 ways that comes to mind, but if you think of any more, please let us know in our public chat ✋🏻

Adding product placement. If voicebots start monetizing their assistance with ads, it will hang like a dark cloud 💨

Controlling your smart home. Both Amazon and Google appear to be working on unique voice signatures, but in a world where anyone in shouting distance can control Alexa, that means the ability to control security systems, locks, and many other IoT devices 💣

Picking sides. Voicebots are programmed by humans, in case you were wondering. For now, many of the answers are provided by Wikipedia (which is not exactly always 100 percent accurate), although some are provided by Google or Bing. Will there be a “conservative” voicebot someday? Or one designed by fanatics? Who knows 🤔

Suggesting certain products. When you to order something through Amazon Alexa, the bot didn’t mention any specific manufacturers, price ranges, or (obviously) a product sold at Best Buy. Instead, it suggests an item from your Amazon order history. That saves time, but it’s also a faster way to provide revenue for Amazon without as much customization or choices 🤑

https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/12/5-troubling-scenarios-as-brands-like-burger-king-hijack-our-voicebots/

Burger King story - https://news.1rj.ru/str/botcube/104.
Our public chat - https://news.1rj.ru/str/botcubechat.

Discover tools for chatbots are coming at f8! 🤖 ❤️

OHH MY GOD!!

Messenger Platform 2.0 improved 100 times 🌟

Now we have:
- Messenger Codes (now could be scanned from native Messenger camera!!)
- Discovery for bots (aka bot store)
- Chat Extensions (ssuuppper cool feature, now you can add bots and services like Spotify to group & single chats to do some stuff)
- M Suggestions (M assistant detects context of conversation and could suggest right bots from chat extensions to use for this particular task! How crazy is that?! ❤️)
- Games (real-time gaming and turn-by-turn games + games tab in discovery)

What an amazing times to build extremely new and great products, that couldn't be possible even half a year ago! 🤖

Some stats for nerds:
- 1.2 BLN USERS ON MESSENGER!
- 2 BLN messages a month
- 100.000 unique bots built by now
- 100.000 bot developers ❤️

I just finished a big wrap-up on what Messenger has launched yesterday. Be sure to read this post and especially go through the features, it's important to understand how the platform has changed 😉

Here's an advice from Phil Libin @ General Catalyst that I’d like to share with you guys:

“Don’t think of yourself as a bot developer. Don’t pitch the whole yourself like that. Think of yourself as making a great product and a product that was impossible to make even 2 or 3 years ago because the technology stack didn’t exist. So what can you do now, it’s a little bit magic that you couldn’t do before. And now is the best time to go and build those things, because the tools and capabilities exist.”

https://medium.com/@flreln/the-most-complete-report-on-what-facebook-messenger-has-launched-on-f8-d43aa88f9c0c