BotCube

Learn to build a stellar kid skill for Alexa!

We are so excited about the language game, we mentioned in the previous post, that we want to publish another great piece of news about it.

Join the Amazon professionals for a live webinar on 8.11.2017 to learn what kids find engaging when it comes to voice experiences. They will share tips and best practices for building skills that educate, entertain, and engage kids under 13.

Register now to build your best kid skill for a chance to win your share of cash and prizes totaling $250,000 by the Alexa Skills Challenge ‘Kids with Devpost’.

http://dev.amazonappservices.com/kids-skills-oct-web-reg.html

Perfect time to step into the voice game to win 25k$

Alexa, the voice service behind Amazon Echo devices and Alexa-enabled products, now supports skills for kids under the age of 13.

Which is a good thing, because kids have a lot of questions that need answering.

Amazon invites developers from around the world to create Alexa skills for kids.

If your skill makes the grade, you could win big.

So what are they looking for?

Here are some ideas:
1. Educate – Inspire wonder. Foster kids’ creative problem-solving skills. Cheer them on for a job well done.
2. Entertain – Bring them into the action with interactive experiences. Make it fun. Make them laugh.
3. Engage – Make a strong first impression. Keep their interest. Make it useful so they want to keep coming back.

Your skill can be any or all of these things.

It can engage one child or several.

It can even get the parents involved.

Best skills can win 25k$.

My team at BotCube is in, and you?

https://alexakidskills.devpost.com/

It’s becoming increasingly easy to accomplish tasks with your voice, thanks to the proliferation of intelligent assistants.

But voice computing won’t make the graphical user interface obsolete, said Alexa Engine VP Al Lindsay.

“When I think about voice, I think it will revolutionize in a natural way the way in which we interface with technology and devices, but it’s not going to replace the graphical user interface”.

“If you can imagine a voice reading back to you a list of 10 items so you can get the one you want, it’s probably not the optimal experience”.

“So I think there’s a sweet spot of combination of multimodal experiences, where voice forward — which we’re focused on — is supplemented with a screen for glanceable information or viewable information that allows your brain to process things more quickly”.

What do you guys think about voice interfaces? Let’s discuss in our @botcubechat.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/24/alexa-vp-voice-wont-kill-the-graphical-user-interface/

Amazon is testing paid Alexa skills

Today, Amazon rolled out a new subscription service that enables Jeopardy! Alexa skill users to get six extra clues per day and the ability to play previous day’s games that were missed.

“Amazon introduced the ability for customers to access premium subscription content within the Jeopardy! skill… The developer tools to create subscription skills are currently in preview with Jeopardy!. We’ll notify developers when the tools are more broadly available.”

The next logical monetization option will be in-Skill purchases.

This can take many forms and in the mobile world is known as in-app purchases.

Let’s see how it goes, but I’m super excited 💪🏻

https://www.voicebot.ai/2017/10/24/amazon-alexa-monetization-introduced-1-99-subscription-jeopardy-skill/

Cortana gets its own smart speaker

Not one to be left out of the party, there’s now a smart wireless speaker that uses Microsoft’s Cortana assistant.

The $199 Harman Kardon Invoke is not hugely different than the Amazon Echo or Google Home.

If Microsoft is able to deliver those promised improvements and perhaps make Cortana work better with non-Microsoft services, the Invoke could be a compelling smart speaker for the rest of us.

Read full review in this article: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/20/16505468/harman-kardon-invoke-cortana-microsoft-smart-speaker-review

Facebook now allows developers to monetize their Messenger instant games

Today Facebook is allowing developers to add in-app purchases as well as interstitial and rewarded video ads

Players get a virtual good or bonus life in exchange for watching rewarded videos.

Facebook will take a cut of the ads shown in Messenger games that are routed from its Facebook Audience Network, and they’ll begin appearing in some games on iOS and Android.

Facebook seems to be taking Messenger Instant Games quite seriously after its desktop game platform withered and mobile gaming was dominated by the App Store and Google Play platforms.

Facebook sees an opportunity to not only give people something to do between chat conversations and a way to challenge friends, but also now to start squeezing more cash out of the 1.3 billion Messenger users without interrupting the traditional use cases as its inbox do.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/19/facebook-messenger-game-ads-in-app-purchases/

Hey BotCube community,

We officially launched Storyline on Product Hunt.

Storyline makes it easy for non-tech people to create, test, and publish complex voice applications in minutes, using templates and visual mind-map interface.

There’s no need to code anything or setup servers.

It’s like a Squarespace for voice apps.

Please go here and check it out: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/storyline-7

If you upvote or comment on our Product Hunt page with feedback, we’ll toss you a golden ticket to Storyline tomorrow 😉

Thank you for all the support!

If you’re asking a user to engage in a conversation instead of tapping a button or two, are you really making things any easier?

“Conversational UIs might mirror the way we naturally like to communicate, but they actually required more mental load than traditional GUIs.”

Really good stuff from Intercom.

When they were building their live chat for sales, rather than relying on text alone they incorporated conversational UI along with one of the least fashionable interfaces – a form.

Here’s a summary of insights they learned building this hybrid interface 📖

Fantastic read.

https://blog.intercom.com/why-forms-arent-dead-yet/

Hey guys, let’s talk about native chatbots today.

A native chatbot is a chatbot that works in either Website or Mobile App environment where the bot owner has full control over the user experience of the entire customer journey.

Why does anyone want to create a native chatbot if there are Facebook/Viber/Telegram and others?

There are a lot of reasons, to be honest, from the ability to customize User Experience to different privacy issues.

Here is a great article from Jiaqi Pan, CEO of Landbot, about that.

I highly encourage you to read it, helps to understand that chatbot is not tied to Facebook Messenger or Viber and also highlights different use cases of native chatbots from such guys as Duolingo and Intercom.

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/the-rise-of-native-chatbot-development-658342167856

I think a lot of you guys remember Surebot - bot that allows you to find the most Instagrammed food and drink spots around you.

It has been featured a couple of times here and even been a "Bot of the Week once.

Yesterday Juraj Pal, founder of Surebot, has announced that they’ve decided to shut it down.

Long story short - “our growth wasn’t what we anticipated and not enough people are actively using Sure to validate it. We did not manage to secure further investment and reached the end of our runway.”

Juraj has also shared a couple of learning from this 1.5 year journey in a Medium article below.

It’s sad to hear such announcements but they need to happen to help industry grow and mature.

Good bye, Surebot, we’re excited for what’s next 🚀

https://medium.com/@jurajpal/were-sure-that-we-re-no-longer-sure-58af9d67c42

Amazon Alexa can now recognize different voices

The battle of the smart speakers has become a constant back and forth between Amazon and Google.

Back in April, Google Home gained the ability to recognize individual voices, which allows the device to personalize its response for everyone in your house or apartment.

Today, Amazon announced that Alexa can now do the same thing.

You can set up voice recognition using the Echo, Echo Dot, or Echo Show.

Users are asked to read aloud 10 phrases, and Alexa will then use that data to create a voice profile.

After that’s done, voice profiles work across other Echo devices and “most” third-party party Alexa-enabled devices.

Guys, I’m really excited about this 🔥

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/11/16460120/amazon-echo-multi-user-voice-new-feature

Api.ai is now Dialogflow!

More than that, they released 2 hot new features:

1. In-line code editor: you can now write fulfillment logic, test, and implement a functional webhook directly in the console.

2. Multi-lingual agent support: building for multiple languages is now easier than ever. You can now add additional languages and locales to your new or existing agent.

Excited to test!

https://blog.dialogflow.com/post/apiai-new-name-dialogflow-new-features/

Chatbot startup NearGroup raises a 1.6Million seed round

NearGroup, a chatbot allowing users to connect with like-minded people based on proximity, personality and their creative content has raised a $1.6m (£1.2m) seed round.

This Messenger chatbot allows users to read the ‘stories’ of individuals nearby, and reply to people they want to start a conversation with.

By showing someone’s content first, not their face, you are more likely to find something in common and avoid the “body-shopping” culture of Tinder etc.

NearGroup has over 2 Million users, and has processed over 2 Billion messages to date.

The current growth rate is extraordinary with 600K new-users joining every month & 20–25M messages exchanged per day.

The team is targeting 100 Million users by end of December 2018 and planing to also bring nearby businesses onto the platform.

https://chatbotslife.com/neargroup-raises-a-1-6million-seed-round-lead-by-openocean-on-strength-of-2-billion-messages-330947923f97

Google Assistant got a bunch of new cool features at October 4th event

Google revealed a lot of products at its San Francisco event on October 4th, namely the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2XL, the Home Mini, and the Home Max.

There were also software features announced for Google Assistant and Home products, but there were so many that they're hard to keep track of.

So if you want to dig up that one specific Assistant feature from the event, you can find it new the article below.

Spoiler: Male Voice!

http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/07/new-home-assistant-related-features-google-announced-october-4th-event/

How to design a compelling personality for a chatbot?

Personality is a key to a successful bot.

It helps you to provide a better conversational experience, saves you when the bot doesn’t understand something and can differentiate your product from other bots with the similar service.

Here are 6 things to consider when designing a personality:

1. Environment
Consider whether the target environment is a work environment or a consumer environment, and what social attributes are acceptable for a personality in this environment. For example, having a personality that is very humoristic might not be the right choice for a legal assistant bot.
2. Audience
Consider the type of audience who will be the primary users of your bot (hint: everyone is never the right audience type, even for Google). A bot that talks in slang might not be the right fit for a more conservative audience and a bot that uses too many three-letter acronyms might miss the mark for others, IMO.
3. Jobs to be done
The task the user is intending to execute implies different personality characteristics, even for what initially might seem like similar tasks. Buying a guitar might require a totally different bot personality than buying healthcare insurance.
4. Runtime variations
This is slightly more complex, as it might require some logic associated with the bot, but personality might be context-driven. It is OK to be whimsical when sending directions to a party, but less so when sending directions to a work meeting to which the user is already late.
5. Locally relevant social acceptance
Some cultures are different than others. Referring to someone as “dear” might be fine in one place in the world while being culturally unacceptable in another place.
6. Existing branding
Many brands feel very strongly about the personality their brand exposes. Slack, for example, wants to expose an empathetic, friendly, and pleasant personality.
7. Values
At the end of the day, the bot’s personality is an extension of the service you want to expose. Think about the core values of the service, as that can imply a certain type of personality.

P.S. I highly recommend everyone who wants to dive more into this topic to read Designing Bots book from Amir Shevat. It's a 🤖 bible.

Apple acquires init.ai

Earlier this week, a small startup called Init.ai announced that it soon would be discontinuing its service.

The team was (according to a notice on the site) “joining a project that touches the lives of countless people across the world.”

They are becoming a part of the group working on Siri.

To be clear, this is not a straight acquisition, but more of an acqui-hire, so Apple didn’t have a comment to offer along the lines of the one it made last week.

Huge news for all the bot space 💪🏻

https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/04/apple-acqui-hired-the-team-from-messaging-assistant-init-ai-to-work-on-siri/

Google has finally released 2 new smart speakers 🔥

1. Google Home Mini
It’s a smaller version of its flagship smart speaker, to compete with Amazon Echo Dot.

The device will retail for $49.

Home Mini will be available in the U.S. as well as United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Germany, France, and Australia.

2. Google Home Max
It’s a big, premium smart speaker for $399 available in December.

While the Home Mini is gonna compete with the Echo Dot and low-cost smart speakers, the Home Max will compete directly with high-end smart speakers like products from Sonos, recently unveiled Echo Plus, and Apple’s HomePod.

“Max is more than 20 times more powerful than Google Home, so it will fill any room in your house with great sound”.

More info about Home Mini: https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/04/google-unveils-home-mini-smart-speaker-for-49-to-challenge-amazons-echo-dot/
More info about Home Max: https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/04/google-unveils-home-max-for-399-coming-to-the-u-s-in-december/

Slack is partnering with Oracle to offer business bots

Slack Technologies has secured a partnership with Oracle to integrate the tech giant's enterprise software products into the popular workplace messaging app.

The partnership will allow workers to use Slack as the interface for Oracle's sales, human resources and business software.

Workers will be able to ask questions such as "how many vacation days do I have left this year?" and instantaneously receive a response from an Oracle chatbot.

The partnership between the two companies came about after Slack secured the tech giant as a customer.

At Oracle, there are 30,000 workers who actively use Slack for work.

Oracle is currently developing these chatbots, and they will begin to roll out to Slack and Oracle users within the next two quarters.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/03/slack-oracle-partnership-will-offer-new-in-app-business-bots.html

BotCube is at Alexa Dev Day in San Francisco today. Come say hi if you're there too. Would love to chat!