BotCube

Hey guys, Maxim from BotCube is here! ✋🏻

We’ve just received our copy of a brand new book by Amir Shevat called “Designing bots”. The book is a practical guide that shows you how to design and build great conversational experiences and delightful bots that help people be more productive, whether it’s for a new consumer service or an enterprise efficiency product.

I’m personally super excited about it and can’t wait to read. Starting right now 😁

You can get your own copy here - https://goo.gl/C4Ae2v

Our days are filled with a constant flow of negotiations, from discussing what TV channel to watch to convincing your kids to eat their vegetables or trying to get a better price on something. But can computers negotiate as good as people? 🤖

Researchers at Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research have published research introducing dialog agents with a new capability — the ability to negotiate. Even more than that - they’ve opensourced all the Python code and put in on Github!

The researchers have shown that it’s possible for dialog agents with different goals to engage in start-to-finish negotiations with other bots or people while arriving at common decisions or outcomes.

Article below shows visual flow of how two agents divide a set of items between themselves by negotiating. Interested? Just read the article 😉

⌚️7 min read (kinda long, but an interesting one)

https://code.facebook.com/posts/1686672014972296/deal-or-no-deal-training-ai-bots-to-negotiate

Do you want to get the current state of bots in 2017?

We are at the very start of a new age in communication between brands and their audience. And to get the whole picture, you need to know A LOT.

Guys from Ubisend asked over 2,000 UK consumers what they think of chatbots, and made a report that gives an exclusive insight into their mindset regarding chatbots and messaging.

Hope this will help you to build better bots. Really valuable ❤️

Hey botmakers! 💥 Vasili from BotCube is here. I'm super pumped that I was invited as a speaker to join the Grand Event about Chatbots and Voice assistants in Munich on June 23rd!!

This is going to be a massive event for everyone interested in chatbots, voice assistants, and the cognitive technologies they are powered by. I will be speaking about UX in bots and how to create great conversational experiences.

So if you have any questions about UX in bots or just want to catch up on a coffee in Munich, DM me here — @flreln, and we'll figure out something 😉

https://www.eventbrite.de/e/grand-event-about-chatbots-voice-assistants-tickets-34959056479?aff=Facebook

The Bot Payment Platform now supports payments from more than 200 countries via 4 payment providers.

Three new payment providers have joined the platform since launch:

- Paymentwall, a global provider that works in 200 countries
- Yandex.Money, well known in Russia
- Paycom, popular in Uzbekistan

In case you missed it, you can read more about the payment platform here: https://telegram.org/blog/payments

We will be adding more payment providers soon. Follow @BotNews if you'd like to stay up to date on the latest bot new.

Awesome news!

Both bot developers and users often face the case when a chatbot doesn’t understand the question or the user's input. As a result, your chatbot can lose users who came with a specific and important question. So there are some good ways how you can design your default answer block in more efficient way.

The article below covers 6 different ways for bots to behave when it doesn’t really understand something - from replying with another question back (aka “The Jewish Method”) to “Human entry point”. All of the points described in the article are from real world and we’ve used them on real projects. So, definitely worth reading 😉

⌚️4 min read (short one)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/6-efficient-practices-to-prevent-your-chatbot-from-being-a-dummy-731074b867c1

Apple has launched a Business Chat!

Business Chat is a bid to turn iMessage into a communication platform and make it one of the main ways of interaction with businesses. These conversations will include basic text chats, but Apple is also offering support and structure for more complex interactions, like scheduling an appointment. Unfortunately, Business Chat is limited to human-to-human conversations for now. I hope they’ll add chatbots support in the nearest future.

I think that Apple has understood that they’ve missed a really rapidly growing conversational market (from chatbots to voice assistants) and their plan is to dive deep into it 🚀

⌚️ 2 min read (super short)

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/09/apple-unveils-business-chat

Today’s #botoftheweek is a great example of inline bots on Telegram.

Imagine, that you’re heading on a barbecue with a group of friends. Everyone is buying something and after a few iterations it’s a total mess. Nobody knows whom to pay and how much. The problem is pretty real, I personally were in this situation at least several times.

Using @splittybot, you can easily manage your group debts. Just add the bot to the group chat and start splitting the debts among all group members, that’s it. Also the team has recently added personal debts, which is pretty cool too.

Good use case and great UX. Love to share! ❤️

🚀 Try the bot here - @splittybot

P.S. We have a developer of Splittybot in our chat, so you can give him feedback right there.

The first conversational marketing platform powered by AI just announced a $8.3 million series A funding!

Basically Automat helps companies use AI to talk to their customers, understand them and serve them better.

With this latest round of financing, Automat has raised $11M USD, the most amount of capital of any company focused on AI-driven conversational marketing.

That's solid.

⌚️ 4 min read (again)

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/announcing-automats-series-a-funding-andy-mauro

"Fantastic answer by the Google Assistant.
Scripted, not AI driven, and yet super fun."

(c) Amir Shevat

SendWyre, a money transfer service that uses blockchain tech, launched a chatbot!

It enables business owners easily send money to any person or business without worrying about high foreign exchange rates, hidden fees, complicated payout timing and high payment fees.

The bot simply asks a series of questions regarding the sender, recipient, and how much money needs to be sent. Then it initiates the request, prepares the invoice, and sends money in a few simple steps. Good UX and nice use case.

It seems that chatbots can really simplify money transferring process. Love that!

⌚️ 4 min read (good one)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/how-this-chatbot-is-making-traditional-money-transfers-more-simple-c5c7b65adbb

Do you want to design your bot at a high level?

It's really hard to build a good design without a proper tool. And there is one.

Meet the bot canvas. Actually, it's a spreadsheet coded with four parts: green, red, blue and yellow one. Each part provide you to answer the questions connected with value, user related, design, development and deployment parameters of your bot.

As a result, Chatbot Design Canvas allows you to get a complete picture of the chatbot you are only thinking to build. Useful.

⌚️ 10 min read (long one)

https://medium.com/@srinivasancj/chatbot-design-canvas-c3940685ca2c

Chatbots are being introduced into almost all spheres of our life. That's a bold fact.

But what do you think about using bots in education?

This field has traditionally been known as a sector where innovation moves slowly. I mean, really slowly.

Nevertheless, during the last years, there has been a large hype over innovative tools to enhance teaching and learning through educational technology.

And here're 6 great examples on how to do that using bots. For example, giving feedback on essays. Good one?

⌚️ 7 min read (educational, lol)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/six-ways-a-i-and-chatbots-are-changing-education-c22e2d319bbf

Here's a starting framework for developing voice and tone in chatbots.

Why does it matter?

Voice and tone can help conversations seem natural. So chatbots are really depend on it. And to build a good product, you need to build a good persona first.

⌚ 8 min read (bigger than usual)

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/branding-bots-part-1-crafting-voice-and-tone-for-your-chatbots-and-voice-interfaces-ac102ad51f56

There were a lot of rumors about it and yeah, it happened. Yesterday, at the annual WWDC event Apple revealed their Amazon Echo/Google Home competitor called HomePod. And yea, it’s with Siri inside 🤖

But what’s more interesting - according to the Apple CEO Tim Cook who said “We want to reinvent home music”, HomePod is more focused on music first, not Siri. The price for this thing is 349$, which is really a lot in comparison to Amazon Echo (180$) and Google Home (130$). Seems like Apple executives looked to justify that higher price by pitching the HomePod as a premium-tier speaker for music - a big focus for Apple - while implying that the Echo and Home are not.

But let’s talk voice assistants. From my perspective - Apple is doing the right thing positioning its new device as something different and premium because of 2 reasons:
1. Siri kinda sucks. A big question for the new speaker, though, is whether Siri is good enough to power its own dedicated device. Siri was around from 2011, but Apple has been slow to improve Siri's voice-recognition technology and set of responses, especially compared with Alexa and Google Assistant. A smart speaker housing an underachieving voice assistant could weaken demand.
2. Apple is late to the market. Amazon's two-year head start with its Alexa-powered Echo smart speaker has allowed it to introduce a whole range of Echo devices, partner with dozens of smart home device makers and sell millions of speakers. Google started selling its competing Google Home, powered by Google Assistant, in November.

But as we know from the experience of past decades Apple usually knows how to break patterns and conquer the market. Let the battle begin 😄

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/05/apple-announces-the-homepod/

Meet #botoftheweek, your personal guide for travel Japan!

Holiday Inn Osaka Nauba launched Bebot, the first hotel-bot in Japan.

Bebot acts as a hotel concierge, provides guests with personal assistance such as booking restaurants, personalized recommendations for activities, and answering questions about hotel facilities and services.

It opens a great opportunity for hotels to improve experiences for their guests by learning about them through informal chat log and also save on personnel by automating responses to frequently asked questions in the chatbot. This way, hotels can simply focus on enabling the amazing hotel experiences.

So if you are going to visit Japan, make sure you get this bot installed, otherwise you can be rejected to checkin 😂

https://www.newswire.com/news/meet-bebot-japans-first-ai-chatbot-for-hotels-now-available-at-holiday-19590002​

Forward-thinking organizations across financial services are already beginning to use AI to automate tedious processes.

But what are the advantages of using chatbots in financial sector?

AI chatbots with emotional intelligence can deliver spend analysis and stock advice, assist in opening or closing an account, transfer money, or resolve a credit charge dispute — decreasing costs a lot.

A real chance to improve banking business, right?

⌚️ 4 min read (good one)

https://venturebeat.com/2017/05/26/financial-services-sector-needs-ai-not-customer-service-for-dummies/

👏 11 good industries for chatbots.

Millions of people already use bots. They are using it for entertainment, shopping, scheduling and much more.

So there are nearly limitless possibilities for what can be done with chatbots. Tons of industries.

But which of them can help you to take more advantages from creating and selling your bot?

Have a look at these cool examples featured in Inc. magazine to understand what to build next!

⌚ 3 min read (kinda short)

https://www.inc.com/larry-kim/11-interesting-examples-of-how-to-use-chatbots.html

Starting today, Instagram supports a brand new type of ads — conversational ads, otherwise, Messenger bots promotion.

Now when user clicks on an Instagram messenger-specific ad, it automatically opens Messenger bot, where he gets a personalized message with content that ad manager previously included in Ads Manager interface.

Do you smell the opportunity? 😉

With this new exciting feature you can create a real conversation with end users and automate some business tasks! It’s smart, it’s focused on a specific action, and it doesn’t require humans on the other side.

The feature will be rolling out in the next few months, can’t wait to test! 😍

https://medium.com/@flreln/how-to-get-clients-from-messenger-using-new-instagram-ads-22c25d81a057