Both variants of this trend, B2B and B2C, are hot right now.
Every other day, a new Slack bot appears on Product Hunt to bring some business process to chat. From the consumer side, the trending social app Peach introduced magic words, which will help get consumers more familiar with commands and automation in conversations. Good news.
Miss Piggy is a bot for Facebook Messenger released a month ago by Disney. This bot demonstrates a very innovative way of engagement for an existing audience. Interaction between brands and consumers is moving to messaging, and Facebook Bot SDK is going to be a big player here.
In the same way that we have analytics for our websites and mobile apps, the behavior of bots also needs to be monitored. Andy Jiang, from Segment, shares some thoughts on tracking and analytics for bots. Our friends at Segment.com are giving out 3 months free of their Startup tier (valued at $99/mo) for free. Reply to this email to get it. Thanks Andy!
A conversation with Ben Brown about bots, one of the most active people in this market. His company built what I’d consider the best library to develop a Slack bot: Botkit. So much so that Slack even added this library to their official documentation.
In order to build smarter bots, we need to identify what users are trying to say. Wit.ai makes it surprisingly simple to identify the intent of a message. This post shows how to combine botkit and wit.ai to build smarter bots from day one.
Skype finally adds a /skype command to Slack to open one-to-one and group conversations. It opens Skype Web, which is pretty buggy at the moment. Hopefully they update this to link to the native app.
