Learn more about ways to find bots from Botlist co-founder Seth Louey.
Mentioned in the podcast:
Golden State Warriors bot
seth at botlist.co
Also, please find the whole transcript below.
Hi everyone, it’s Balint from chatbottutorial.com and today I have a guest with me. He’s Seth Louey, he is the founder of the BotList.co and today we’re going to talk about his experience with chatbots about BotList and in general about the design of bots.
-Hi Seth, could you please introduce yourself in a couple of sentences for the people who don’t know you yet?
-Sure. Hey I’m Seth Louey here, I am the co-founder of BotList. We basically are an app store for bots or I would like to say we try to connect humans to bots. We have been alive for about a year now, well a little over a year and we’ve seen some amazing things in the bot ecosystem and I’d like to think that we’re one of the best discovery platforms out there for bots.
-Ok, awesome, thank you. I know you designed websites before. Did it ever occur to you that the websites should be more interactive and not the way they are?
-Oh yeah. I could see this coming from many years away, actually when I first jumped on slack back in the day, I think it was like 3 or 4 years ago, we actually coded our own bot in slack and it was just something very fun to do, it was named Claptrap and it was just, you know, you could interact with it every day and it would just be a fun little tool to take away from, you know, work and it would be nice little break so we could definitely see in our action coming from a long way away, so yeah. It’s an incredible time to be in the space.
-Was there a need for you that you wanted to be more interactive with these forms or you just heard about it from somewhere?
-You know, I think the thing is like everyday everybody is so busy and you know if we can make things easier with automation it would give you more time to do the things that you really want to do in life. You could definitely see the need for it, especially with multiple social media channels and multiple tasks, everyday everybody needs to work harder and faster but we don’t really spend much time enjoying the everyday things, so when you automate some of your trivial tasks, it’s better for you, you now, to spend a lot of time in life doing the things that you really want to do.
-Yeah, that’s true, like the power of integration, so you can just see the IFTTT and …
–Zapier.
–Exactly, exactly. So, what was your first bot experience?
– Well, before we launched BotList, we definitely tested a bunch of bots when they were first coming out, but before that I think the very first bot experience was the one when we built in our like internal communications and it was purely just for entertainment but I’d say, you know, the best integrations are the automated tasks like I said. I think IFTTT I wouldn’t necessarily call it a conversational bot, but I mean technically it is a bot when it automates a lot of stuff for you. So I would say very, very early on stages IFTTT was the first bot experience even though it wasn’t really a conversational piece. So if you look at it in that sense, definitely IFTTT, but as for like a conversational UI, I think the posturing was probably one of the most memorable experiences, interacting with some of their, I think it was like Humanie (?) was their bot; that was probably one of the best experiences and one of those well factors of like ‘holy crap this, you know, conversational bot actually can just sit there and have a conversation with me’ and it’s not real human so I think that was very exciting and the most memorable.
-Thank you. So let’s go back to 2016 January when you started with the BotList. What did you know about bots back then? … that you had before, did you know that Messenger will open soon? What was the idea?
-Yeah, so the original idea for BotList came from a conversation with Ben Tossell, he was the Community Manager at Product Hunt. Ben actually was talking with myself and my co-founder Mubashar Iqbal and we were just talking about how, you know, bots would gonna be a thing; we knew Messenger like everybody could knew Messenger was a Facebook who was gonna talk, a little bit robot at F8 and I think this was in like January 2016. And all 3 of us kinda teamed up and said ‘well, there are multiple bots out there or they’re going to be multiple platforms out there’, so we needed like a one stop shop for finding all the bots, you know, there’s voice bots there is Alexa, Google Home, there’s the conversational UI, so we’ve just kind of thought about it, it’s like well everybody’s gonna have their own directory, Slack already has her own directory, so why not just create like one place where anybody can go and just search for, you know, something that will help them out everyday and that’s pretty much where we came from.
– What there a point that you were like convinced ‘ok, boots are going to be big’? Was that an event or just continuous, like new companies entering into the space?
– You know, I think it really was like, at first we were, you know, thinking that it was going to be huge and we still do, you know, I personally went to F8 this year and just saw what are, you know, the possibilities of chatbots or conversational elements and that’s going to be huge. But originally, you know, we kind of created a lot of products and we kind of just like whatever sticks stick so this one, we kind of knew something was a little bit different with it from where we first started it but we weren’t sure how far it was going to go, and even then and even now. Because when we launched, a month after Ben actually didn’t have the time to put into, you know, driving the community because, you know, he had a full time job; I mean we all do but, you know, so he had to leave BotList, which was interesting just for the fact that we didn’t realise how huge this was gonna be. So like I said, to really further answer your question. I think there’s this like timeline of like you have this hype train and you keep driving it and in all of a sudden there is this… people are very impatient, so the hype train kind of like dies down a little bit and you know people start like questioning the product and you know the true believers kind of like skim off the top of like the true believers of you know bots and in general and we just kept our heads down and we believed and you know how bots can really automate, it’s just the development community needed to like kind of catch up and just be like ok we’ll figure out what’s the main purposes of these things and what are the tools that we can actually drive to make bots popular.
-Yeah, definitely, so some people being discouraged from bots because of, yeah, the expectations that they have. Actually I think the official communication of Facebook and Messenger is that they’re not chatbots, it’s just I think it needs more time for the better experiences.
-Oh yeah, I totally agree, but that really happens with everything, I mean, I look at like your first apps that came out on your iPhones. They wanted the best you know experiences but you know several years later there is over billion it like I don’t even know billions, I forgot what the number was, billions and billions of apps you know on your iPhone and people are just getting super overwhelmed by like downloading apps and trying new apps and testing, so there’s that as well and that’s why you know if you can get into one app and just test out a bot without downloading it, I mean, that’s pretty awesome where you start.
-Yes, the easy onboarding and no install is definitely a selling point against apps, you know. So I think I came across your site in November last year first time but you launched the day before the F8 conference 2016. What were the preparations back then? What was the basic of the website? I imagine it improved a lot since then.
– Yeah it definitely improved and we still have a long way to go, you know, nothing’s perfect. The thing is you know technically it’s not my full time job you know, so I actually have a full time job and Mobs does you know he contracts full time so we spend a lot of nights and weekends on BotList, so it’s not where we wanted to be yet and I don’t think it will ever be just for that you know I’m a perfectionist and everything changes and evolves, but so our preparation for the launching before F8 last year, was well, we knew we needed like a lot of content so we wanted to hit a mark, I think we tested and put on 400 or 500 bots in a time before our launching, so there was that we also went through the user experience. I am primarily a designer by trade, so I went in and you know I talked with the team and we would figure out ‘Ok, what’s the best experience? Can people test the bots, can people add media?’ So there was that, but yeah we launched the day before on Product Hunt and the theory was that if we can launch the day before F8 and Facebook just talks about conversational bots at F8 and they release the next day we can ride that wave of press and media. So we reached out to you know a bunch of publishers like TechCrunch, I think we were on Engadget, where are a bunch of tech blogs they publish and we just kind of rode the wave which was awesome. In that first day or two I think we’ve had like 90,000 people visit the site, which was pretty awesome. But you know a lot of work went into it, we worked on it since January and F8 was in April 10th of 2016, so hopefully it will improve in the next year so, but yeah it was pretty awesome.
-So you mentioned that Ben stopped after one month even though you had a pretty successful start. Was it really discouraging for you or you said ok I understand he’s busy and this is still a really hot thing to do and there’s the good future for you to stay?
-Yeah, that’s a great question. I think at first it kind of was because so Mobs and I have this theory since I’m a designer and he is you know our CTO. We always had this theory that best teams work in like three, so you need somebody to drive the product, need somebody to design and execute on a product and you need somebody to be there for the back and in like coating up the stuff that you’re coming up with, so the growth hacks whatever. And I think like at first we were really like kind of a little bombed that we didn’t have somebody you know the face of the company driving it, but then you know we took a step back and we talked about it for a little bit and we were questioning whether we get you know a third party, a person to join us or if we continue driving it and pushing it and I think the thing was that I really solved, I mean we both really solved it but I just got a little obsessive about bots and I just said you know like I’m just gonna to take the reins and we are just gonna go forward with it. We did test out another person joining the team about like a month later, that didn’t really plan out but you know he was excellent and also you know getting us in front of VentureBeat so we are official media partner of the VentureBeat so it was nice. But yeah, so it was discouraging at first but we kind of you know took a step back and said ok, well if Facebook is running with bots and you know they have over 1 billion people monthly actively using this thing, then we could just continue with it, push it and drive it, so it was discouraging you know but it was a good thing because now we work a little stronger, that’s it.
-Yeah, Facebook actually just doubled down with bots F8 this year.
– Yeah, you could say that.
– So, you’re pretty active on Product Hunt and I think you were awarded as well. Didn’t you see any place for Product Hunt in these bots popping up like every other bot is published there as well or if it is just too generic for the bot ecosystem?
-No, I mean I see a lot of products or bots being hunted on Product Hunt. I’d say about an 8th of our bots are probably or have been hunted on Product Hunt. The thing is like Product Hunt is amazing community and look for Product Hunt for inspiration all the time. We actually, if you submit a bot and you have it on ProductHunt as well, we want to feature that on your bot page so we have like a little call to action in a sense you know, discusses on Product Hunt or whatever. So people can actually go there and see what the Product Hunt look like. The thing is, I kind of like lost track of the answer, but I just get into it again, but Product Hunt is an amazing place for initial discovery, initial launches but we wanted to be the place for long-term communication for the bots and there is I guess a network of people that are interested in it, so it’s two different types of communities which is interesting. I’m not sure if I answered your question properly.
-Yeah, you did. So what is the biggest difficulty so far by building BotList?
– That’s a very broad question but I think the difficulty is the upkeep right now, we’re trying to automate a lot of that, you know, we still haven’t opened it up so botmakers can just edit their own pages, just because there’s an approval process we don’t want, you know, anybody going to the site and just seeing a bunch of spam, so that’s been kind of an issue I’d say. The biggest difficulty would be probably marketing BotList, but the thing is we’ve been in a game for so long that, you know, more and more people are starting to drive traffic to BotList and we have an excellent growth team that we were working with right now to market the bots to outside of the bot community and I think that’s interesting where we’re taking different tactics. Most people like basically market to the inner group, so there is like 25.000 people in this one bot group on Facebook. Most people are just probably trying market to them but we’re actually trying to market to other communities like entertainment or games (18m57s), so we are really just trying to put the focus on driving growth out instead of just keeping it in this like inner circle. I think that’s pretty difficult, but you know we are doing and excellent job right now, we have new users coming to the site every day every month and we are very excited about you know the future and what that can mean. So I think the difficulty of growing is tough especially when it’s, you know, I wanna call it a side project but it’s really not. You know, it’s a really full-time passion but like I said before, we both have full time jobs and I work on this still like midnight sometimes and I get up at 4 a.m. So it can be tough week after week and that I don’t enough time in the day is probably the most difficult part.
-Yeah, I definitely wanted to comment on that that you have a full time job, you have BotList, which is another full-time project actually. If I’m correct you commute to work so you lose some time there as well and you even found the time to build some bots. What bots did you build?
-Yeah, so I’ve built a few. We built another platform called BotJobs and it basically uses BotList’s network to facilitate the jobs in the bot ecosystem, so we have our own like job boards, which is kind of nice, but I built that bot on Chatfuel, I built like some fun ones, I built a good bot, because I’m a huge Marvel fan, I love Marvel, and I just wanted to have fun and see how fast I could build the bot and in a weekend it was like 15 minutes on Chatfuel it took me and I was like getting the art, getting the assets so it was nice. I’m starting to build more with some time because I want to test out the other platforms like ManyChat it’s live, it has just come out with some new updates so I want to test that out. Probably the most well-known bot that I did build was, well I started building our BotList but the one that’s probably more well-known is, I built a utility bot for Steven Bartlett, so he is the CEO of a social media agency, probably the number one agency in England and you know it’s an interesting bot because Steven is kind of an influencer and he talks pretty much with everybody in his community so he spends most of the day responding to Snapchat or YouTube videos or Messenger and he came to me and he said you know I have all these messages inbound all the time I just need something to kind of like filter them and kind of put them into their own like little category that’s you know something Messenger doesn’t really do, they don’t really you know tag like ok this one’s about business or this one is about advice, so you can kind of like determine what the messages are and how fast to respond to them. So that one is an interesting part I would say. So I would say that the only ones right now that I can really talk about I have some in the works right now. Since BotList isn’t you know driving, let’s say we are not funded so we don’t have, you know, we have funding through advertising and bot jobs and stuff; we are starting to get into like or maybe we can build some bots for some celebrities or influencers or anybody who really comes to us just so we can fund a little bit of stuff that we need for BotList, so we are starting to do some contract work as well.
– Ok, thank you. Many things I wanted to ask later on as well that you mentioned so let’s just go with the advertising. You offer some people to feature their bots, is that correct?
– Yeah, so originally we wanted to do inline advertising so when you go to BotList you will see, you know, the daily bots and we wanted just to put like hey this one is sponsored. So that means he’ll stay up all week long as to where every bot changes, the list changes every day and sponsorship is you know a weekly slot that somebody can be up there all week long, they can pay, we have some numbers on and what that will affect, we can put them into the newsletter, you know we’ll tweet about it or put it on Messenger and we’ll put it into some of our other resources to help promote that bot. We recently opened up like a top page slider, so we are starting to get more advertisement in there just so we can drive more traffic throughout the week. So that’s kind of interesting but we want to create more ways that our community can grow and help them grow. So we are trying to do as much as we can but we are looking for I guess a little kickback with advertisement just to fund like hosting and buying t-shirts and sending it to people so that’s what advertising really does. It doesn’t pay salaries or anything, I don’t really get any of that, it just goes straight back into the service, which is a great thing actually. We are trying to create more ways people can just grow and advertise and you know utilise the traffic that we get on a daily basis.
– Yeah and I know that you turn this money back into the business and also have the whole bot community grow in a way.
– Yeah, so we tell to all of our community that if they can write for a like we have a publication on Medium, they can talk about you know some of the stuff that they learnt and in turn we will promote that with using another service called Quuu that Mobs had you know in hand in building, which was kind of nice, so we promote other content on social media and it goes out daily and the promotion through Quuu is awesome, I can think that gets enough for helping us out and pushing you know the bot community to the masses, so for example in an article can get you know up till like I would say 2.000 viewers or maximum 2.000-3.000 viewers used it shared across social media; Quuu has been amazing with helping promote some of the bots.
– Yeah, that’s amazing. Facebook one of the things announced this year is the more prominent role in the Messenger for the businesses with bots. They have a discovery tab or some kind of discovery tool inside of Messenger. Do you think it’s a kind of a competition for you or it’s for a different targeting group?
– Yeah, that’s funny. I was at F8 and a lot of our community was there as well and they’re asking my thoughts on that and I still have an article that I’ve been writing and I haven’t got out yet just way too busy but I don’t think it’s a direct competition. It was interesting seeing the bot community, the bot builders out there, a kind of rejoice in the fact that there’s just a discovery tab but the thing is it’s like getting featured on the app store. How difficult is that? You know, it’s so difficult to get featured on the app store. Will you get a featured in Messenger? The opportunities are very slim, so you kind of have to take that into consideration when you are building a bot, you are not just gonna submit it to the discovery tab and just cross your fingers and hope it grows. That’s not gonna be beneficial to everybody. You kind of have to do the old school, you know, building valuable content around you, what your bot does, building up your page, building up your community. So to answer your question more thoroughly, there’s only one you know, that discovery feature is really only on one platform and we have I think 16 platforms of bots. So it’s not gonna like sync BotList of anything and I don’t think that it’s going to be hugely successful for everybody, it’s going to be successful for a very minor few how do get featured. And I’m very excited about it. I think people, you know, who build these bots and spend a lot of time into these products, I think it’s very good for the ones that do get featured but I just don’t want to discourage everybody from just crossing their fingers and hoping that are going to get featured through Messenger, because that discovery tab could go away tomorrow. You know, Messenger could determine that, it’s not the best approach to discovery so the might just shut it off tomorrow, who knows. So that’s why like you know sticking to a like third party platforms or end building up your community and submitting to BotList; I think those are very important and I hope that, you know, the bot builders in the community see that it’s not the best approach, it would be amazing to get featured on Messenger, but I hope that our community just kind of continues to push their products because they’re learning and evolving just for the fact that, you know, a lot of the stuff, a lot of the bots that are out there aren’t the best but you can learn in the depths from that and I hope that they don’t get discouraged if they don’t get featured, that’s my only like crocs there.
– Ok, thank you. I hope for the best for you, for your future, I see you’re working already very hard and I think you deserve a long, long-term success with that.
– Thank you.
-So you have a background in design, you mentioned, you worked with Riot Games, Epic Games, Warner Brothers, Entertainment and one of the things on BotList many people probably don’t know is that you personally look at every bot and just decide if it’s of a good quality enough to be featured on BotList. So you must have seen quite a few bots. I think you probably don’t publish the precise amount of bots on BotList but I tell everyone listening it’s quite a few. So coming from the design background, what was the thing that you saw like discouraging? What were the negative things that you see you come up again and again with the bots?
– Yeah, that’s a great question too. So just to give you a little background, we test all the bots just because we believe that in order for bots to grow it’s about quality not quantity and a lot of the bots that do get submitted a lot of times they don’t have like some of the very basic fundamentals of building a bot. Same for Messenger. You don’t have like to get started buying or somebody goes there and I just don’t do that the bot is like blank and there is nothing happening and if you say hi, the bot doesn’t understand ‘hi’, or the bot doesn’t understand, you know, get started or something so simple and what we try to do in order to give better about this in the next like quarter or something, but what we try to do is whenever a bot has those issues we don’t publish it, we just don’t approve this omission just for the fact that it’s broken. So lot of times what I do is when I do get a chance, I try to email whoever submitted that bot and just basically give my feedback. I’m starting get a little bit better about this; what I’m going to do now is that I’m going to record my first initial thoughts and then send them to the submitter, or the bot maker or whoever. I did this last week with a special bot and it actually turned out really well and got a lot of feedback, like the entire team that was building the bot was, you know, amazed at my first initial reactions with the platform or the product. So I’m going to try to do this a little bit more and in an essence, you know like having that simple like get started or responding to hi or responding to an emoji. All that stuff is definitely needed within bots and you know when you don’t have that and you don’t think about it because you to focus on creating that one initial value but you have to consider that if I don’t know anything about your product and somebody sends me this, I need to know like the very, very basic about like what am I there for. Because a lot of people test things like it’s so easy to test a bot because you don’t have to download it, all you have to do is go to a Facebook page and hit message or whatever platform you’re on. So it’s so easy to test these bots that a lot of people don’t really understand the value before they even go there, because that is not like this learning curve, that is not an app store where you like look at that bot and read ok well this is what it is, this is BotList, but, you know, for example like you go to an app store, before you hear of something, you go to the app store you read about it and then you have to download it. There is no like process with that right now. So understanding the value and pitching your value in a very, very short amount of time is very difficult for a lot of people and I think, you know, focusing on human psychology and on initial conversations and not throwing a lot at somebody at once. I think those are the major like issues with bots now, those few things of being very simple and very informational at the same time. I think these are some of the main key factors that some bots that are out there are having difficulty with.
– Yeah, the barrier to enter the bot markets, so to say, is really low actually and also like the expectation of people is kind of different because they probably just want to message a brand and they … (35m36s) have their first bot experience vs the app way where the app should have been approved by the company and then they go as you said to the landing page and then install the whole app.
– Yeah.
– So you work for a company where you deal with payment methods. One of things Facebook tries to do is be like the ManyChat of the West, so integrate many payment opportunities. How do you see the future for that, also in regards to the Messenger code that they just updated?
– I think it’ll take some time, my generation is so used to, you know, spending in store, online, by purchasing online for e-commerce that was huge, but I think it’s going to take a little bit to get people used to the fact that, or get people to trust the messenger payments. You know, Facebook is such a broad community and it it’s everywhere; there has been privacy concerns in the past and I think getting that security is going to be very difficult, like getting somebody used to or trusting the security around payments is going to be difficult. But you know, I’d say like if they can make me trust them with payments, I would do it. I mean I probably do it now anyways just for the ease of purchasing and something just because like if I’m messaging a brand or something and I see it right there, I want to make it the easiest way possible to get those goods. So I can see it being here, I just think there’s someone like not trust issues but, you know, learning curve with everybody the broad audience trusting messenger and inputting you know the credit card or whatever. The codes feature is kind of interesting; I’ve never really used QR codes or anything, I thought it was a trend at first, I tested it, I guess I could say like I didn’t really liked QR codes for the whole like grab your camera, download a QR code reader, scan it, get push off to a site, you know, I think I didn’t really like that at first but testing the QR code reader at F8 this year, it was very interesting you know, just open up the messenger app, open up the camera, scan it. But the thing is, you know, when you can have multiple QR codes for a bot and inject the user into a specific sequence of the conversation, that’s kind of interesting. And I don’t think we’ve seen like one of those like ‘wow that was amazing moments’, you know. I mean we haven’t really seen that yet with the readers because the codes are so new, but I can see it being like, you know, you’re walking through maybe you go to an amusement park or better yet, you go through a library or you go through something and I guess it’s like a step by step, I can just see it being like very powerful with storytelling, in conversation or I can see it being very popular with brand. So if you go to Golden State Warriors game and they have, you know, QR codes and concessions; you can like maybe scan something and pay for it right there or, you know. I can see it being huge, but it’s going to take some time and, you know, we are just getting used to the fact that there are these automated responses when you talk to brand, so it’s going to take a little bit more time to really drive that at home.
– Yeah, definitely and one of the things I really like about the way they announced it that I know it’s not really a thing to use QR codes outside of Asia, but still we want to improve.
– Yeah, one more thing, I think it’s going to get easier also, because people are going to be used to be spending a lot of time with these messaging platforms, so Messenger or Kik, you know, people are going to get especially with the AR stuff that’s coming out, right. They are going to be so used to spending the majority of their time on these messaging platforms so having different ways to inject them into different experiences is very powerful. And I think you can be huge, just it’s going to take a little bit.
– Ok. I have a community question from … He asks: ‘What bot features resonate most with users, for example AI, webviews, usability, usefulness?’
– Yeah, you know like right now people are just kind of throwing content at their users and I think that’s good for like publications or you know, like TechCrunch sends me a daily like here are the top things you subscribed to you. I think that’s pretty interesting, but a lot of people try using those cards and galleries for specific things that technically are the best user experience. So I ‘d say, you know, the best feature that I’ve seen was the Golden State Warriors bot doing an excellent job with keeping me up-to-date with real time broadcast of like their Playoff games. I think that was an excellent experience, because I’m so busy, I don’t have time to pay attention to the Playoffs but I do like the Golden State Warriors, so letting me know that Stephen Curry maybe nailed a buzzer-beater 3 or something like that. I don’t have to go to ESPN now. I don’t have to go and watch the highlights, I can see it right in that brand. So I think, you know, being more personal with brands is huge. So I think technically it’s not really a feature, but that real-time broadcast, I guess, really is a nice feature. AI is going to take a little bit of time to really… down an experience but I can definitely see AI and AR being like huge within bots. They’re going to complement each other really well in the future, but I think that’s a little bit off. So I’m not sure if I really answered that question properly just for the fact that it’s taking time for everybody to really figure out what the best possible experiences are right now. But you know sending those real-time broadcasts are really nice, especially if you are a fan of, a brand, a bot or something like that.
– Yeah, actually you asked recently in a Facebook group about quotations, what people think what would be the good things to say about the bots and why to develop bots. And what I answered is like bots can bring 1 on 1 intimacy at scale for the platforms that people have the attention for. I think it’s just to add on their answer as well like this disability to have this personalised and broadcasting thing in the messenger itself is a huge thing. What would be your quote?
– Ugh…um…
– Sorry to really put you on spot now.
– Yeah, I really like your quote actually. I think the 1 on 1 is huge, especially for the fact that most brands now say like ‘I’d like a clothing brand’. Most brands aren’t very personal, you might go to the store, you might purchase something, you might leave. One day you could have a really great experience with that brand and the next day you can have a very terrible experience, because the cashier wasn’t very nice to you. So you have this like crazy wave of like very positive and very negative emotions within that brand in an ecosystem. I mean everybody has had that, so when you don’t have to interact with a human component in that fact, and the bot knows exactly what I like and what I don’t like, that’s huge for a brand. Having that key component and being more personal with that brand is definitely a beneficial, it could be very, very, very beneficial if the bot is built right. So I agree, you know, I would like to just pay back and say I really love that quote, I think it’s excellent and I totally agree 100%. As for my quote, I don’t know actually, you put me on spot too soon…I just think that, you know, bots can be an amazing, new, innovative way to reach out to individual users. And I think it will be very important for people to understand conversation in the future and that’s going to be the difference between a very successful bot and a very terrible experience as conversation.
– Yeah, the conversational design I think is going to be a huge topic and I would love to have your thoughts probably a later time on it, but yeah, I appreciate your time and would have two more quick questions if you don’t mind. One of the things is that you see so many bots, I don’t want to go like your absolute favourite bot, but for example from the last couple of weeks what was something that you saw and said ‘hm, that’s something new, something worthy’?
– Yeah, I very talked about the Golden State Warriors bot, I think that was an exceptional experience and I’m still amazed by it, if anybody wants to try it out you should, I definitely suggest like taking a look at how they’re interacting with users and messaging and broadcast. But that was an amazing one, one that I spent a lot of time with, there is a bot called Lemonade Stand and I don’t know if it’s still live, I haven’t played within awhile, but you know, the initial experience was very funny, it was a game, so it was kind of like teaching you lessons and entrepreneurship. So if you have 5 lemons and you know, you can get 10 glasses of lemonade out of that, how much would you sell of it to get a profit? I spent a lot of time with that bot, just because it was very interesting for the fact of like I’m an entrepreneur and I’m like ok well, I’m trying to figure this out and I’m trying to get you know my profits up and my expenses down, I was trying to figure out the equation there, so that was very interesting and I liked that. Yesterday I think we released a Walking Dead chatbot that one was cool too because so Telltale Games does this story mode of like if you are part of the Walking Dead and you know, you have these two options and you go down this one rabbit hole, what’s that experience like afterwards? But they are not Telltale, I don’t remember who the publisher was, but they just put out their own bot. They are promoting their game but at the same time they can have his life story modes and you can go through, that was kind of cool. But yeah, so the utility, I haven’t really like you know, other than fact of like Daily Digests and stuff I don’t really spend much time with like utility bots and you know, because the return on like say if I’m looking for a flight. I don’t look for a flight every day so I’m not going to return to that body every day. There are multiple use cases there with like different types of bots, but I’d say, you know, those are the top ones after my head that I kind of enjoyed in the past few weeks. I see so many that it’s like everybody always asks me what’s the best bot. Well, you know, I test so many bots every day that I always forget about, I wouldn’t say I’m the best person to ask that question just for the fact that I test so many that I kind of like forget about that user experience, because there are new user experiences every day. So it’s kind of a good and bad question for me.
– And it’s also with so many eye opening topics that people have the first experience stronger in their memories. So for example learn about, I don’t know, personal development and the first book they read about it is always the best so to say, because that opened their eyes n a way.
– Yeah, exactly. And my eyes are so blinded by the fact of just like I have to go there and test and when I’m there like digesting the value of a bot model. I mean, does it have to get started by and does it have, you now, a response to ‘hi’, you know. So I’m not really there for like testing the value of the bot, I’m there for testing the user experience of the bot and making sure that everything’s proper, all the links are proper, I get a proper avatar image and things like that, so it’s very difficult for me. There is a lot of times like I said, I’m going to open up, I’m going to start doing book reviews and testing in the fact of sending those to the bot maker. So I’ll be a little more aware in the future of that experience, so I am very excited about that.
– Amazing. I know you like to listen to podcasts as well as I do, when you have time like in the car or doing sport and you can’t really do reading. So that’s actually one of the reasons I started this Podcast to help people learn about chatbots more when they’re on the go. Who would you nominate as our next guest, who would you like to listen to and why?
– Have you ever talked to Josh Bocanegra?
– Not yet.
– People know him because he’s teamed up with Christina Milian and they built a lot of celebrity bots. The fact that matter is that Josh is really smart at testing different theories. So he would go in and build something in test like maybe Instagram influencers or like how you interact with the bot within Instagram influencer. So he tests a lot of conversational user experiences which is really great and you know, there’s a lot of like trial’n’error that he’s doing on the back and I think he would be an interesting person to talk to. Off the top of my head, I mean there’s so many out there that I would say just like, I’m trying to think of like different people Anastasia Green, she built the bot for Golden State Warriors, she would be an amazing guest, I like her approach to like that bot. So I think anybody who really is pushing the boundaries would be a great guest just for their trial and error testing and see what they’ve learnt I think that’s great. So, I would give those guests a try.
– Ok, thank you Seth, I really appreciate your answers and taking your busy schedule and coming to the show. Where can people find you and how can they help BotList grow even more?
– Just submit your bot and write content, it will help promote it, we will spend our money, I will promote it, that would be huge, just spreading the word about BotList and getting their content in front of people and our audience. I think that’s the best way anybody can really grow, so that helps out tremendously. I mean you can ask anybody that we promote out there of like the value that we try to give them. So I hope you know we are pushing, you know, the envelope for them as well. And you can find me anywhere, I’m Seth Louey, @sethlouey, I have every handle, I’m the only Seth Louey in the world and I’m proud of that, I even searched google, I swear I swear oh my God, I’m like the first actually 15 pages of google and it’s all about me, there is nobody else, so that’s kind of unique. Just find me there, go to BotList and if anybody has any questions or they want to talk about BotList advertising or anything about bots or you just want to update your bot, I spend multiple hours a day responding to emails and messages, so that’s seth@botlist.co
– Amazing, thank you very much.
– Thank you for having me.
– Thank you, bye!
– Bye!
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