James Patterson’s Next Novel Will be Released on Facebook Messenger

Well this is pretty cool. At first blush, this could seem a little gimmicky, but digging deeper this could actually be really interesting--especially as it involves other mediums. Apparently readers will also be able to interact “with the characters and locations with videos and sound clips that tie into the story” and main characters even getting their own instagram profiles. Not sure how much interaction there is from a conversational standpoint, but snaps for an interesting approach to the channel.

12 Ready-Made Facebook Messenger Chatbots You Can Clone Today

We’re curious--has anyone tried these? Think it’s safe to say that many in the Bot community have dreamed of templates (we did)--one easy bot the white label to millions! But the reality is templates are really hard to pull off intelligently. Now if these templates also came with trained up use case-specific NLP models too, then that’s a totally different story--a real game changer. But just the template feels like a recipe for some very unsatisfied customers...

R/GA and the Ad Council Bring Back GoVoteBot for Midterm Election

And just in time for the Midterm elections in the US, Reply-powered GoVoteBot is back. We love this use case so much--taking dense, hard to understand information and makes it accessible, personal, and instant. Now, go out there and exercise your civic duty! 

Lessons Learned from Applying Deep Learning for NLP Without Big Data

As Miguel García Rodríguez, Backend Developer at Reply puts it: “10 min read time ... 10 weeks understanding time.” This article is admittedly really dense, but worth it for anyone in the throes of training up their bot with imperfect data.