We’re starting May in a bit of haze following the crazy month we had in April! Facebook announced their much awaited bot SDK, LINE released theirs as well, Kik announced their bot store and Telegram significantly improved their capabilities. That has kept our team pretty busy: yesterday we released full support for rich media (call it templates, custom keyboards or keyboard suggestions) for all platforms.
Now it’s time to build better and better conversational experiences. We’re all experiencing the early phases of conversational bots and we’re seeing the first attempts at creating industry standards and best practices.
An analysis of how a classic set of usability heuristics apply to bot conversation design, and how some of the most well-known bots (Poncho, CNN, 1-800-Flowers) score.
The author argues that a bot doesn’t necessarily need to be easier to use than an app. But, rather, the key is that it needs to more efficiently minimize disruptions in your daily activities.
In recruiting, the “beer test” is what you use to figure out if a candidate fits your company’s culture: would you enjoy having a beer with this candidate? The author lays out some good practices for making bots more friendly, so that they pass the test.
One of the low-hanging fruit for bots is customer service; bots that make it easy for consumers to have their issues resolved quickly. This may change the way consumers perceive customer service interactions, and will also impact the role of customer service agents, especially those in large organizations.
This event will explore the potential of bots in the messaging space for businesses. The panelists are Dennis Mortensen from x.ai, Daniel Ilkovich from Dexter, Rachel Law from Kip and Omar Pera (me) from reply.ai.
