6 Voicebot Challenges and Opportunities

If you have any entrepreneurial inclination, we dare you to read this article and not want to drop everything and build something by the end. The voice ecosystem is so fledgling, but there is *so much* to be borrowed and replicated from mobile apps, it’s like build-a-company for dummies. And, as the article points out, with voice app retention around 3 percent after seven days--literally any improvement is amazing. Go! Do!

Facebook Chatbot: Persistent Menu 101

If you’re like us and had mixed feelings about the new-ish Facebook persistent menu, then this article is for you. It breaks it down into how to actually take advantage of it (pretty staggering that you can to add up to 93 titles/75 calls to actions into your persistent menu!) .It’s still not perfect--clunky even, especially turning Composer input on and off (there’s got to be a better way), but this helps a bit explore how to be more effective with it.

Chatbot Acquisition & Engagement Strategies – Chatbots Magazine

Reply’s Clara de Soto, along with Rachel Law of Kip, Adelyn Zhou of TopBots, and Drew Austin of Wade & Wendy spoke together at a Dashbot panel to talk about the question on many bothead’s mind--how the heck do you even get people to talk to your bot?! Great perspective from folks across the bot spectrum, Adelyn who’s got a bird’s eye view of the landscape, Rachel and Drew who are launching standalone bots, and Clara from the big-brand enterprise lens. Anything we missed here?

Emily Bot Walks You Through End-of-Life Decisions

Shaking off shivers, this is pretty remarkable. First of all, it’s a bot that’s focusing on the Silver Tsunami, vs. another millennial-heavy bet so bravo on that. Second, my goodness is this a chillingly effective use case.  Not only does the private nature of a chat make total sense here, talk about offloading an incredibly unpleasant task onto a bot. This is exactly what we’re talking about, though, that the objective of a bot should be to provide a service--not necessarily mimic a human. The intention here is to make something suck less.

Chatbot Conference

Will you be in SF September 12th? Don’t miss the Chatbot Conference. Reply’s own Clara de Soto will be speaking there.