Telegram: Video Messages and Telescope

Lots of cool features launching on Telegram. Of course there's a lot of excitement around payments, but we’re pretty pumped about these new video messaging features. Omar uses voice messages in Whatsapp *a lot*  but we’re excited about how these instant video messages will evolve. Obviously lots of similarities with Snapchat (not ephemeral, though), but we like the directness of this facilitating communication--especially how they don’t allow one to review before sending. Like a REAL conversation IRL--imagine that! Although will be interesting if their blogger-oriented tools take off given the lack of editing ability.

Chatbots Could Save Businesses $8BN a Year by 2022, with banks and healthcare gaining the biggest cost Savings

Very compelling stats in here. We especially like the quote from Marc Lien, Director of Digital Development and Applied Science at Lloyds Bank, about the impact chatbots can have, not only in B2C communication, but behind the firewall as well and facilitating communication and knowledge sharing within an organization. We think that’s in general a more compelling use case for finance, since in our opinion--banking is the one area where it the consumer does ultimately feel more safe and secure within a dedicated app experience. Not to say the chatbot can’t live *in* that app, but will require to think about things differently.

What’s new in Microsoft Bot Framework – Chatbot’s Life

Microsoft--a serious dog in this fight, eh? They’re coming out swinging, from updates to LUIS, to analytics tools, better documentation, and the introduction of Cortana Skills. Lots of chat-tastic stuff coming from Seattle. As we covered last week, we’re *very* excited about the inclusion of bots in Bing searches and would argue that’s the biggest step for bot discovery, dare we say even more intuitive than the Messenger Bot store? Are you working on anything with this new Bot Framework? If so, let us know!

Google Quietly Debuts Chatbase, a Chatbot Analytics Platform

Boom goes the dynamite. Google takes another bold step into the bot space with the release of an analytics platform, aimed at making bots, well, suck less. Lots to unpack here. As this article suggests, Google stands to benefit by learning how brands are having conversations with consumers on popular channels (Messenger, Slack) that the don't currently have insight into. But the biggest benefit is to democratize the ability to improve bots--to ‘fix broken experiences by viewing “a prioritized list of user messages not handled well”’ (not to toot our own horn, but we at Reply already offer this. Will be interesting to see the ripples this makes in the bot community. You know for folks in the space who, well, all they do is analytics. We’re thinking that they still have staying powers for brands who don’t wish to share everything with Google. Either way, analytics are only as good as the way the bot is built, to actually extract the right analytics in the first place.

Memo.ai

📝 Note-taking for technical teams. Met these folks at Superbot last week--really great team. Such a simple and powerful idea.

Chatbot Acquisition & Engagement Strategies

In New York June 5th? Don’t miss this panel including Clara de Soto from Reply’s founding team. It’s free, full of fembots (brilliant ladies in chatbots, duh), and awesome, thanks to our friends at Dashbot