What worked and what didn’t in the first MessinaBot live chat

Chris Messina created a personal bot, and he shares the lessons learned about the office hours feature, that allows you to book some time with him to chat about bots. Good insights about what went wrong in his approach.

Two months in: How the 1-800 Flowers Facebook bot is working out

Main insights: they found that users need clarity about when they are speaking to a bot or to a human. They attracted a few tens of thousands users, most of the being millennials and new users. It took them three months to develop the bot. The user experience is quite linear, which seems to fit quite well this simple use case.

Papers about chat bots

I just discovered “The Morning Paper”. They publish a review of a CS-related paper every weekday. And the future ones are going to be around the space of chatbots, covering deeply some technical papers around the underlying technology. This post is an introduction to this series.

Making software with casual intelligence

An interesting piece about the concept of small improvements after analysing your users, to provide some degree of intelligence. The post doesn’t go into specific examples, but applications for bots are definitely powerful to personalize the experience based on past usage. I’d like to share an example that doesn’t require much advanced AI: if your user didn’t engage in any of the last 10 push notifications, try something different for him/her. (I am looking at you, CNNBot.)

The African future is digital… The WhatsApp effect.

A story that shows how important WhatsApp is in Africa. As Benedict Evans pointed out back in April, WhatsApp has about 2x the message volume of Facebook Messenger. The volume of WhatsApp is insane, and I am really curious about their next steps. Just as a reminder: the penetration of WhatsApp in the US is very low compared to other countries, where it has become the de facto communication vehicle for virtually anyone with a smartphone.

Talkabot conference on Sept 28-29 in Austin, Texas

Talks and community building about bots. For developers, entrepreneurs and technologists to learn about the how’s and the why’s. We’re giving a FREE ticket for the conference. Ping me to participate: we’ll select a participant randomly on July 17th.

Botathon on July 9-10 in SF, NY, Austin, Toronto, Chicago and Melbourne

This is the first-ever international Botathon. Applications are still open until Friday, so, if you have a bot or would like to build one over the weekend, send them an application! The finalist teams will present in VentureBeat’s MobileBeat event. My co-founder (and brother!) Pablo will be a judge for the event.