002 – Finding Bots – Interview with Botlist co-founder Seth Louey

Learn more about ways to find bots from Botlist co-founder Seth Louey.

Mentioned in the podcast:

Botlist.co

Golden State Warriors bot

Product Hunt

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!

 

The post 002 – Finding Bots – Interview with Botlist co-founder Seth Louey appeared first on Chatbot Tutorial 🤖.

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001 – 10 Years Experience with Bots – Interview with Botego Founder Ekim Kaya

Ekim Kaya is the founder of Botego, a client business in the bot spaces since 2007. He is sharing his experiences with us today. Listen to this interview to learn more about the industry.

Links mentioned in this podcast.

https://bit.ly/botbusiness101

Feel free to comment or reach out directly to Ekim ekim at botego.com

You can find the full transcript below.

 

 

Hey guys, it’s Bálint from https://chatbottutorial.com and today I have a guest with me. He’s Ekim and he’s the writer of the successful book on bots entitled ‘Bot Business 101’.

-Hi Ekim, could you please introduce yourself in a couple of sentences for our listeners who don’t know you yet?

-Sure. My name is Ekim and I’m the founder of a bot company. I founded Botego in 2007, I’m an engineer by education and an entrepreneur by heart and it’s been 10 years now, so we started before Apple acquired Siri. I was following the team of Siri back then. When I was studying engineering in Istanbul Technical University, I used to work as a call centre agent and that’s when it hit me that there’s something wrong with customer service, because people keep calling you and ask the same questions over and over. There’s huge room for improvement in terms of efficiency because it’s costly, time consuming, annoying, not for the customers, but also for the agents and the business, so it’s not a sustainable operation for any business. And that’s why, you know, all American enterprises switch to India or other Eastern countries to provide customer service but then their customers didn’t really like it, they had to switch back to America, all the costs associated with the operation is a problem again. The game has changed right after the Facebook invested around this time last year and I’m just now enjoying the fact that I’ve been waiting for this for 10 years now.

-Thank you. So, if I understand correctly, you were working during your university years as a call agent.

-Right. It was just for a short time, no one wants to have a career as a call centre agent, that’s why there was a huge turnover but that’s when I realised that we can fix this with software.

-Did it influence your direction like after the college or was it always on your mind becoming more efficient with technology?

-Yes, I’m always interested in fixing things in terms of making them more efficient, not necessarily physical, because I never worked as an engineer but when you see that you can build a machine, a software, a system that can work by itself, it’s really satisfactory, it’s really fulfilling for me. The fact that things work for me as I sleep: bots, the software, gives me satisfaction and I always try to find shortcuts and increase efficiency wherever I can.

-Bots have a big history but didn’t get traction before. Do you think that acquiring Siri was significant for the development of bots?

-Well, when you look back, you can now consider it as an important milestone but it’s been so long time and Siri itself didn’t really take off for a long time. So I’m not sure that it really changed things Facebook having a stronger connection with the brands and it had more influence over developments of the bot ecosystem. Because, if you remember, TechCrunch somehow found out that Facebook will be announcing a bot platform on their F8 Developer Conference last year and they somehow got this information and leaked it. Right before the conference I remember Microsoft and others, maybe Line as well, they announced their bot platforms so it was kind of a rushed launch. I remember, we checked up their APIs and they were really simple, because I think they just put together something in a couple of days, so this shows the power of Facebook over any milestone that they set out to release, and I think it’s the first time that all tech giants: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, they are all betting on the same thing. You know, Microsoft CEO said ‘bots will live in your apps’ and Google CEO described, explained their vision as an AI in general and bots as a subset of it, you know, Google Home, Amazon Echo are now in our homes already. So, Siri is the first real step improvements, I mean creation, let me say, all this ecosystem, but Facebook changed things a lot more than Apple.

-I definitely agree with you and we probably wouldn’t be talking if Messenger bots didn’t exist.

-Right, you know, if you remember MSN, as a messaging system, Microsoft had MSN bot back in maybe 2009 or something, even earlier, no in 2007 we founded our company, so it should be 2006 the latest. So Encarta was their online encyclopedia and this MSN bot was offering content from Encarta. It was really simple, just based on keywords, it was bringing up the related article from the encyclopedia. This is the first bot that I ever used, mainstream on MSN. Years later it’s an industry now.

-So you founded your company in 2007. What was the first project you took on as a company?

-Well, first I went to my friends, who are founders of other start-ups and one of them is a bigger one in Turkey, Yemeksepeti. It was recently acquired by Delivery Hero for more than almost 700 million dollars, it’s one of the biggest acquisitions in the Turkish internet ecosystem and I told them ‘you have thousands of transactions every day and I can help you with your customer service interactions’. And they said ‘Ok, let’s try it but we don’t want to pay a huge amount for this, because we want to keep providing the human touch when it comes to offering help to our customers. So it could only have a limited use when people are asking about their passwords and those kind of simple questions, not about their orders’. So I said ‘ok, fair enough, let’s start’ and they’ve been our customers ever since. It’s been 10 years now. And then we went to an incumbent telecom operator and that was the first major client we landed and we had a lot of experience, we learned a lot from that project.

-What is the most difficult part on setting them the idea of chatbot or AI?

-That difficulty has transformed significantly over the course of 10 years, because in the beginning no one had an idea of bots, so we started our presentations by explaining what a bot is. Now most of the clients are coming to us, we receive a lot of involve, interest, so at this they have a basic understanding of what a bot has to offer. Back then it was nice to have, you could create a difference by offering your bot, because we are talking about before smartphones, it’s only web-based and websites, I mean, since there is no smartphones, the website usage is much higher compared to today, so it was really primitive compared to all these messaging platforms we have now. The reason why bots are really strong now is that these messaging apps are already in everyone’s mobile devices. Back then, the traffic on our bots was really, really low, so it was difficult to convince businesses to pay a decent amount of service fees. That’s why we struggled in the beginning to survive as a bootstrapping start-up, but now we just need to convince that you want to build a bot with an experienced bot developer, because it’s as easy as building an app now with all these platforms and all these tens of thousands of bot developers out there. Businesses don’t know who to start a project with; every time to convince them that it’s now a matter of experience when it comes to building a successful experience in time management, creating the right sequence, the decision tree. These are the things that they need to pay attention to. So, bot building is not rocket science especially after Microsoft’s bot platform and Facebook’s API, it’s a piece of cake. But you need to really offer a good experience, you know, not to disappoint the user.

-I see. So as I understand, back then it was more like talking about bots what are they what’s going on and now it’s more like ok, it’s probably obvious that someone will need a bot, but what is the best use case, what is the best company to develop it, right?

-Right, the use case is really important because they start with the wrong. They say ‘ok, how can we build a bot?’ This is the wrong question. I wrote a blog post on our official blog and I said ‘Don’t build a bot just for the sake of building a bot, that’s not the right position you want to be. You just have some pain points that bots can address and you can use our expertise to solve those problems for you using bots. They are just tools. When you’re basic in putting an IVR tool inside your customers’ mobile phones. So same principles apply when it comes to bot building but you have to have a problem to solve. I mean, what will your bot do? What’s your goal? What are your KPIs? You have to know them, otherwise you can’t measure your success rate, right? You’ll never know what you’re getting. And that’s the problem between mid-level executives of enterprises and top-level executives. Because usually top-level executives want to see results, that’s why they are up there, so you need to deliver. You need to convince the business units to do something meaningful and measure and keep improving all these.

-I see. I imagine bots were a bit different back then. What was your vision about bots back in 2007? What was your thinking in 10 years, so, for example this year, what would be a bot look like?

-Well, I don’t consider myself as a visionary in anyway, I just happened to start this business and I was lucky just to survive for 10 years. You know, just think that, as I mentioned it in the book, I was trying planning to shut down the company right before the announcement of Facebook bot platform, because I told it’s not going anywhere, it would never take off. I really didn’t have a vision about 10 years later, I just was trying to see the next step, and in terms of technology, we were really, I mean, when I look back now, it was a really bold move to try to build your own NLP engine because there are no platforms, there are no NLP engines available, no content databases. Now you can see that people started to adopt new job titles like bot designer, bot content developer, so now you have all these resources and it’s really easy. With trial and error we built our first tree versions of our natural language processing engine and as a local company we started in Turkish, which is a difficult language to deal with in terms of language structure, then we expended to other languages, starting with English. So I was again just trying to see the next step, I mean, I didn’t know if the company would survive for another six months because our costs were really minimal, that’s why we were able to survive, but we didn’t really have a real revenue for a long time.

-I see, so it was always about like getting a new client or a new project going on, probably.

-Yes, and it’s really so time consuming with the clients because enterprise clients it takes six months to two years to close a deal. It’s amazing how slow they can be. That’s the most difficult part of trying to survive as a bot start-up.

-Yes and I really enjoyed that you were talking about that in your new book as well, like giving practical tips about these clients and different types of companies and industries.

-That’s really important, because if you never sold anything to enterprises, you will always be optimistic until you face the reality. It’s really ugly. You should be really prepared to not get paid for a year, a minimum of 12 months. Beginning with the initial contact or your prospecting efforts all the way to signing the contract, invoicing, and getting paid, it takes really ages.

-I think it’s probably easier now with the Facebook announcement, I mean, back then there were probably some people who wanted bots to be more powerful, but they were, so to say, injured, like they were dissatisfied with the current state and now they have this story from back then, probably, but still the opening of Facebook might change their mind…

-Well, one of the most important chapters of my book is ‘Managing expectations’, because all these tech giants set the expectation bar too high with another line of products, AI products, and they have these amazing resources of information that they can process, I’m talking about about Siri, Google Home, Amazon Echo, they have all these data sets that they can use and millions of people using these products. So, what they are trying to issue with this technology is completely different from what we are offering as bot developers. I always try to get my messaging calls when it comes to explaining what bots are. We have a limited content domain that the bot is responsible for, which is your products and services. Don’t expect them to die into discussions of philosophy or even answer a question about what the weather is like today, because that’s not what bots are built for, if you’re talking about enterprise bots. People when they see a bot they feel like it’s a challenge to their intelligence and their first reaction usually is to test the limits of the bot and let’s see if I will be able to fail that; of course you will be able to fail that. Do you ever call a customer service number to try to fail a live agent? It doesn’t make sense, right? Even live people are expected to follow their written script, you can’t just call someone and ask something completely irrelevant. But again, because of these technologies, people are expecting a lot from bot, so our first purpose as bot developers should be to explain the difference between this strong AI and a practical application, which is bots that will answer customer questions. I always use the analogy of call centre agents. If you don’t expect something from the call centre agent, don’t expect it from the bot either. Another important thing is that there is always a time frame for improvement, for every bot project, because it’s always beginning from a scratch, you’re basic in feeling a knowledge base and it’s always the unique database, a set of questions, so it would never be the same compared to their first day and their second or third month. There’s always a time frame required to improve the bot, so they should be ready for this and they should invest the time and effort into bot development in this one to three months’ time frame.

-Yeah, it’s definitely always that you have this idea how it will work and then confronting with the real clients and then oh, I never thought to want that…So you have to update accordingly. like from the real feedback, not just like you and your friends.

-Yes, and we build model for the bot projects and we had 40 disappointments in the beginning, because when the customer realises that they need to keep entering new questions, the first day is almost always full of disappointment and you never get used to this. You don’t want them to test your product because their tests are so different from the real use case, the real customer never asks the questions that they use during their tests. This is what we’re trying to explain to them. They always come up with so formal and long written questions and we know for sure, that no one will ask that question, so we always tell them ‘it’s a numbers’ game, you need to cover 80% of the questions from day one, and you already received those questions through your e-mail, your support tickets or your call centre; so, let’s try to cover them first, then you will see that in time it will improve, of course you just need to keep entering answers. They are horrified when they see that day one is a complete disappointment.

-Would you say that because some of the limitations people would treat chatbots like a query, like a search in a way, because it is easier for the bot to understand the keywords?

-Well, there are various approaches when it comes to handling a question; some of them work like search, so the fact that there is no standardization in bot development is kind of a problem by itself, people don’t know what to expect from bots and they always have to try and see how that specific bot operates. That’s ok, that’s the natural evolution of the technology. Until there were two major operating systems in mobile that was the case as well, we had BlackBerry, we had all these other Linux based operating systems, and now there are two major ones and people know what to expect from Android and what to expect from iOS. I think we will see this as a similar process with bots, so the most important thing is to communicate up-front with the user what is bot capable of doing and what’s the content domain. As long as you say ‘I’m here to help you with this this and this’ and once the bot fails, you will again cover that, you will address that situation properly and then you will be fine. You don’t want to say ‘Hi, I’m a bot, how can I help you?’ People don’t know what to ask, they don’t know what they don’t know. So as a bot developer is your duty to handle the user experience from the greeting all the way to the end.

-Yeah, I agree definitely. There is a Facebook group where you are used to all the questions coming up again and again, so, the same way as a call agent, you need substructure, and that’s when you decided to write your book. Was it like that?

-Yes, exactly. I see how people are struggling finding customers or finding the right technology. Actually I didn’t cover the technology part, because there are millions of these sources who do that and I’m not a developer myself, although I’m an engineer, that’s why I think I would be able to provide more value by covering the business angle, because unless you have real hands-on experience with trying to sell bots, there’s no way you can learn this experience. So even though the things have changed over the course of 10 years, in terms of selling bots, I think I have a good understanding of what should be expected when you’re dealing with enterprise clients, so I wanted to share my experience and I thought it would be useful, I hope it is. I get good feedbacks, that’s why I’m happy that I did. One thing that surprises me is that people thought, I call them B2C bots, the individual bots is the way to go. I think that’s not the case, because people don’t really know what bots are yet, I mean, I’m talking about masses. If you stop anyone in the street, no matter what education they have, how old they are, they will know what a mobile app is. That’s not the case with bots yet. We still have time to get there and the enterprise bots, enterprise companies are the ones that will enable this, I mean, fundamental shift in perception of bots. That’s why now it’s time to invest in developing those bots and that’s where the money is. You see on this Facebook group, except for just a couple of personal bots, they are not really taking off. There are millions of personal bots and people just don’t know that they exist, right? But if you build a bot for Bank of America or General Motors, they have millions of customers and they will push it, they will aggressively market it just to get their bots to be used. So I think by the end of 2018 almost all enterprise client will have some kind of bots and after that it will be a good time to focus on B2C bots because people will know basically what bots are.

-What was the most exciting part about writing the book?

-I really tried to release the book as soon as possible because I saw the need to address most of those questions and last time I checked, it’s been awhile, I sold more than 2.000 copies so I hope these 2.000 plus bot developers are going through each chapter. I’m not sure if they are all targeting the enterprise space, but I just wanted to be the first person to answer these questions. There are a handful of other bot developers out there and they are positioned as some major companies like Next IT or Nuance, they required a Virtuoz, a French start-up, so I don’t think they are interested in providing guidelines to the bot ecosystem but I somehow felt responsible to do so. So just seeing all the positive feedback from the community really was the drive that I needed to write the book in such a short time. It took me less than two months to write the whole thing.

-Yeah, congratulations on the sells numbers…

-Thank you.

-I think you had part of like protecting the whole bot industry in a way, so people won’t sell expectations and then deliver poor results. So in a way like protecting the whole system so that not so many companies would have bad experience from the start.

-Well, this is my message but of course I can’t just everything solemnly based on my own reach; people just need to try and see for themselves unless they read the book and decide to follow my suggestions. So some of that disappointment is inevitable, but you know this curve when it comes to adoption of any new technology; we have already passed the high point and now the expectations will be set, so we will be more comfortable in terms of what customers and users will expect from us and what we can deliver, of course. Facebook and Microsoft keep investing in the platform and that’s great, we will be able to offer better bot experiences. And bot development has already become a commodity, so we just need to create difference by offering a better experience now.

-Like how you addressed in your book as well and have many online points to have a way to update your book. So you addresses that the bot scene is very dynamic and changing all the time, and that expect now with all the big companies that it even accelerates in a way, right?

-Yes. Well, we receive at least five inbound requests for building a proof of concept for enterprise clients per week now and it’s a really strong indication of enterprise bots that they will become an industry standard real soon. And I think WhatsApp will be a game changer when they will offer an API that can be used to build a bot, they do offer now, but it’s not commercially available. So we are not suggesting to build bots on WhatsApp now, but once they do, I mean, my parents don’t use Facebook Messenger, but they do use WhatsApp, so I can tell that this is the way to increase our reach to a whole new level, then we will have hundreds of millions of new users, potential users, once that happens. I’m excited to see when that will happen.

-What do you think, talking about WhatsApp, what is the reason there is so much of silence from Facebook site? If I recall correctly that at the F8 conference this year last week there was nothing mentioned about WhatsApp really. Do they want to test things with Messenger first and then move to WhatsApp or what’s the logic behind it?

-Chris Messina was holding an online event and I asked this question to him and the answer I got was that what’s a bot is designed for is to offer point-to-point communication and you know now encryptions, communication security, is an important topic for them. So bots being in the middle of this communication requires some major changes in their structure. That’s why they were not able to adapt so quickly, but I think it’s a work in progress and they’re already testing with some selected businesses to offer customer service over WhatsApp. So, I think bots will be the next step for them and I think by 2017 we will for sure see WhatsApp being involved in the bot space.

-What do you think about God bots? Do you think they will be like this dominant factor and little bots will be connected to them or other the brands pushing the individual bots out.

-Well, anything can happen. It all depends on what the big players will decide to bet on. Currently it looks like it’s driven by individual brands and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In the long run we will definitely see some platforms that will summon different resources of information. Again, 6 months is a really long time when it comes to changes, improvements in the bots space, I can’t even foresee 6 months later, so I’m not good in projections.

-One of the things I’m the most excited about is voice recognition and how it improved in the last couple of years and it allies well with the God bot idea for we as like we’re walking in the room, asking about the weather, texting a friend, asking about your marketing campaigns or results… So, do you think on the long run, voice will be bigger than texting or it will be more like balanced?

-I’m not sure about Voice. I was one of the early testers of Google Glass and the reason why Google Glass wasn’t a big thing like Google expected, was the fact that people don’t want to speak in the street with a device at this for now, unless it changes. It’s difficult to expect people to talk to themselves, at this point, to look like they are talking to themselves. Their exception is Google Home, Alexa, Echo, those devices are sitting in our homes or our offices, so it’s ok to use them. But it has some restrictions and important ones, so you shouldn’t have a huge accent for them to understand you, you shouldn’t be in a loud space, so of course technology is always improving, but I don’t think we will see them used as part of the bot technology in the time soon. So there are still things to be fixed in terms of speech to text, there are problems that need to be solved.

-I can definitely relate the accent thing, you should probably see some of the conversations I make with Google now.

-You know, Americans have a hard time trying to tell what they want to do on these automated IVR tools, they get annoyed, so yes, they should really be working well if that’s going to become a worldwide thing.

-Yes. There is an idea in your book I want to quote and it seems like it could be like the bigger next step after we have this voice recognition already solved. So you said: ‘One day you will have to explain to your child that you used to call customer service representatives manually on a smartphone and your child will look at you with that amazed expression and ask: so you didn’t have global net gene back then?’

-Yeah…I can tell because I have a 3-year old son and he is always watching this YouTube Kids app, the cartoons on my smartphone and when we go downstairs with the elevator, when the internet connection disconnects for just 30 seconds, I see how he’s outraged, you can’t expect him to not be online for even 30 seconds, because he doesn’t know what being offline is, he is just 3 years old. So, that’s why they are not patient, they don’t need to be, so I am 40 years old and even I don’t want to call a call centre. The idea of waiting in the line for 2-3 minutes is so annoying, so yes, it seems we already have these tools, the hardware, the software already available, it’s time to offer the service widely available to everyone. There’s a recent research about Millennials, they say that 68% of them prefer companies, brands that offer a self-service tool and they don’t want to call any real person if they have a tool to take care of their problems by themselves and they’re not brand loyal. You cannot expect them to be loyal to you anymore. They are experience loyal, that’s why you always have to improve what you have to offer and the best experience seems to be self-service now, because it doesn’t make sense to wait to speak to a real person when you can do it by yourself in 5 seconds.

-Yes, as a Millennial I can definitely relate to bot, so no brand loyalty and no waiting if I can solve it by myself.

-Same for me. I mean, it’s a shift, it’s changing, because the expectations are higher now and we have to deliver or we will be extinct, you know, what kind of troubles these big brands are getting into, just because they are late to catch the train just a couple of years.

-Yeah, exactly. So do you think that technology will be some partly like evolve with the humanity as well and then just become as a common and no entity at some point, or what’s this global engine thing?

-Well, yes. We will all have virtual assistance as part of our lives. Currently, there are different tools to handle different tasks but why not just one assistant to cover everything for you? I think we are not far away from that and it should already have been available. So, it’s like…now it doesn’t make sense to you to use ten different apps for different tasks. I think the Eastern countries already realise that; in Japan, in China there are these super apps that do everything in just one app. You can pay, you can chat, you can set meetings, anything you can imagine, you can do with just one app. The same applies for virtual assistance, you don’t need to have one to set your meetings and one to order food, another one to book your flights and hotel room. So someone will build a technology layer that will bing together all these basic data contents, so as a provider you will be able to be a part of this and you will be offering, you will be a part of an offering that has many aspects through just one smart assistant, rather than having 5-10 different ones.

-Ok, so it seems like I would have an assistant and the assistant would take care of all the communications for me, in a way.

-Yes, because you don’t need to know what works on the background, right? You just want to have one point of contact and the technology should take care of the rest of all these web services, APIs are already available and it should be presented from just one contact.

-Amazing, thank you. As a last question, I would like to ask you who you would nominate as our next guest to interview and why? We talk about chatbots AI and chat marketing.

-Ok. I would strongly suggest Chris Messina as a candidate for his really good understanding of the technology and he worked for Google, for Uber and he’s one of the opinion leaders now and I hope he accepts, because it’s really enjoyable to listen to him and he’s constantly learning, constantly sharing information, so I appreciate his efforts to improve the ecosystem.

-I will definitely invite him, I also listen to him as many occasions as I can or read his writings, they’re always of good quality.

-Tell him I said him hi 

-Thank you very much Ekim. Where can people find you if they don’t have your book yet, or what about your company?

-Ok. So the company is Botego – a short for a bot with an ‘ego’ because it always improves and my email is ekim@botego.com Ekim is an opposite of Mike if you have a trouble with spelling. Feel free to ask anything you want.

-Ok, thank you very much and if you haven’t checked it out, ‘Bot Business 101’ is the book and thank you very much.

-Thank you for having me. I have a shortcut for the Amazon URL, it’s https://bit.ly/botbusiness101, it will take you to the profile page of Amazon.

-Ok, some extra data for Ekim. Thank you. Bye-bye!

-Thank you, bye!

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Is ManyChat the Best Messenger Bot Builder for Online Marketers? – Review

If you are reading this review article I assume that you are a little bit familiar with chatbots. Should that not be the case, take a look at my chatbot intro article.

As a marketer and business owner, I am always in the search of new cutting edge tools and methods. Sometimes, I waste too much time doing that as the implementation and learning curve can take a while.

So in this article, I want to share a bot builder tool with you that you can implement and test fast for your business only minutes after hearing about.

When I first tested ManyChat last year, it didn’t have many of the functions it has now. As a result, even though I thought it was easy to set up and use, it was just not enough for me.

I didn’t care much, although I’ve heard from Digital Marketers and I guess Frank Kern that they like it (not sure about the latter one).

In the beginning of March, however, I took a second look after another recommendation and was pleasantly surprised.

There were exactly the functions I needed and couldn’t have at other builders.

I was spending many hours figuring out how to make a popup for my Messenger flow.

All plugins I’ve found were only compatible with email…

Email is still mandatory, but I’m all about having my flow in Messenger now.

I’m still collecting email, as it (among others):

• Is the basis of many integrations
• Is a great channel to promote and make sales
• Provides extra security for a (now) very unlikely post-Facebook life -your asset

Anyways, in ManyChat it is just a few clicks to set up a popup. You’ve most likely already seen the welcome page takeover (full-screen popup) on this post.  I know they are annoying, but they work. But I guess you already know that as a marketer or business owner

So the easy setup and tracking of user acquisition made me switch.

ManyChat is just optimized for Marketers and Online Businesses. Period.

ManyChat still has many many limitations. If you want to handle complex conversations and integrations, it won’t be enough for you. But it may give you a feel for chatbots, while you figure out the features you actually want. It’s fast and free to set up after all.

But enough of the rant, let’s jump into the review:

Setting up ManyChat

Starting out with ManyChat was probably the easiest thing I’d seen since learning about chatbots.

Just a couple of button clicks like the one below and your page is already connected.

When you finished with this step and got redirected to ManyChat, you only have to choose which page you want to connect your bot to, and it is already set up.

After setting up you can already build your welcome message or first sequences.

 

Features

As I already mentioned at the start, ManyChat has a few limitations. But keep on reading, likely you wouldn’t know how to set up more complex systems from the start anyways :).

Also, if you use your chatbot only for basic marketing purposes or as a newsletter service, you have more than enough tools to use here.

So a quick look at the features I’m going to expand on:

• Messages
• Growth Tools
• Sequences, broadcasts
• Autoposting
• Live Chat, Audience option

 

Messages

Setting up messages is pretty easy when you know which tools to use.

So different options you can have:

Text – does not need an extra introduction, basic text like you would receive from your friends. You can also add up to 3 buttons with extra messages, links or phone numbers.

Image – again, just like to friends, you can send pictures or gifs with the chatbot

Card – this may need some explanation. It is a combination of image and text

Gallery – an advanced option of the Card – you can add more cards next to each other so the user can vertically scroll through the options.

List – you’ve probably never seen before. Similarly to the gallery, you have an option to choose from more options. But this time they are listed under each other, so it is a bit better to scroll, but less space for your text and picture.

Audio – just like with friends you can send a voice message. Here you have the option to attach an audio file as well.

Video – same as with audio. Your users can directly watch a video of yours inside their Messenger. You can drop a video here. Not sure about the allowed length or size to be honest. It works with my 23-second video but did not accept my 5 min long one. On another platform, I know there is a limit to 15 seconds.

File – could be really good if your lead magnet is a pdf or something extra that is not supported file by Messenger.

Delay – you can delay the delivery of certain messages with an option to show typing on the other side.

Question – a recent feature, here is a detailed video about it

 

These are your options for every time you build a message. You can stack them, so, for example, a picture followed by a text and a voice message.

So how can the user ‘trigger’ these messages?
They can appear as:

–Welcome message – user clicks on ‘Get started’ (just a small shoot-out how much I like that they include the unsubscribe option by default at the start, not all chatbot builders do that…)

–Opt-in message – user uses one of the Growth Tools to join your Messenger

-Message triggered by a keyword – user types something that you’ve defined

–Default reply – user types something that is not defined as trigger word

–Broadcast message – user approves you to send messages

–Auto posting – content from your other channels (like Youtube)

–Sequences – Based on your set up you can send automated messages to the user.

 

Growth Tools – Marketers dream come true

These are providing you an opportunity to capture leads and put them into your messenger sequence. ManyChat is hands down the best here.  After the user clicks on one of the Growth tools, he/she receives the opt-in message that you can individually set up.

By this, it can be way more specific – depending on what you offer – than the default welcome message. The more personal, the better. You can also segment these people already with the first message. That way your messages afterward will be more relevant, improving trust and conversions.

The best thing is that you can see how they actually perform. This is how I’ve realized I set up my pop-up incorrectly back in March. The number of impressions was not even close to each other, implying that the second growth tool is set up incorrectly…

If these stats were unavailable for me, I probably wouldn’t have noticed it for a long time, missing out on many leads.

 

These are the growth tools you can use to ‘lure’ someone into your Messenger funnel

 

Instead of going over each of the options, I am going to quickly show you how to set up one growth tool inside of Manychat, in detail:

 

If you are like me and not that tech-savvy, then this is priceless. Also, the JSON option is really good, if you are driving your audience directly to the Messenger from the ad. Another option is the ‘Comment-to-Messenger’ method, you might want to try it out for higher engagement and social proof

You can track your funnels and tweak them according to the data. You’ll see at every individual, how they’ve opted-in.

 

Sequences, broadcasts

Sequences work very well with the growth tools together. You can use different sequences for different opt-ins.
For example, you have a ‘7-day Transformation Challenge’ as your lead magnet on your website. You set up an overlay for that offer. As users opt-in, they are automatically put into your ‘7 Day Transformation’ sequence. So for the next 7 days, they receive your messages automated, in their time zone.

With different buttons and actions, you can segment them further (using tags), or subscribe to another sequence. Many opportunities here. Onboarding, teaching, follow ups – your imagination is the only limit.

Having sequences makes sure that the user does not stay alone after entering your funnel and forgetting about your hyper special offer.

You can broadcast to your audience as a whole or to different segments.

For the segments, there are also different options like tags, how they’ve opted-in or to which sequence are they subscribed to. This enables you to send only relevant messages to your users.

You can schedule the broadcasts in both your time zone and the user’s time zones. Also, you can set a limit for sending it in e.g. only during business hours.

Another great function that ManyChat provides is the notification settings. You can send a silent message to the users. This function also shows ManyChat’s giant commitment for a better user experience. They also pay extra attention to Facebook’s 24-hour rule so the users won’t get spammed.

I really appreciate this as my business is quite dependent on the future of Messenger Marketing. Facebook set’s these rules to enable a better user experience. If the user experience is good then the future of chatbot marketing looks bright to me. So please guys, don’t spam your followers, as they will associate the negative experience to all chatbots – at least in the initial stages.

Autoposting

This feature enables you to update your audience with content from your other communication channels. Options are:

• Facebook
• Youtube
• Twitter
• RSS

 

It would be nice to have some other integration options here as well. You’ve probably heard about Zapier or IFTTT that help you integrate different software. Of course, the best solution would be an API, but then ManyChat would probably lose its USP and became more complex.

Of course, the best solution would be an API, but then ManyChat would probably lose its USP by becoming more complex.

Live Chat, Audience

One should never forget that Messenger is an intimate communication channel. We talk to our family and friends here, and barely to any brands. Manychat kindly reminds you the personal aspect of the channel, by letting you see the actual users. Besides the profile picture and some data added by Facebook, you can see the tags, opt-ins, and sequences you’ve set up in your bot.

 

One big plus is the ability to interact with the users inside of ManyChat. You not only see the relevant information like how did they enter your funnel, but you can also manually add tags to them and assign them to different sequences. So if there are any issues with FB, which are quite frequent, to be honest, this can give you a second chance.

The audience option helps you dig deeper into your customers’ mind. You are able to filter to specific segments of your audience and take a look at the individual conversations. By doing this you can see common patterns or ways to improve your conversational copy.

Limitations

As I said in the introduction ManyChat is not for everyone. If you’ve read the features part of the article, you can see that it offers a bunch of functions that can improve your marketing and the customer experience as well.

In my opinion, there would be room for more, however. I am sure it will come. We are only at the front foot of Chatbots.

What I wish ManyChat had:

-Integrations

This is one of the big reasons chatbots gained traction and also that I entered this market. We want things to be easy and instant. It would be awesome if you could have certain information just at your fingertip without leaving Messenger.

– Artificial Intelligence

Yeah, I know it is maybe a bit lot to ask, but it would be great to have at least a bit of better keyword tool. It is problematic to give in synonyms or wildcards (so if they say ‘thank you’+ something)

-Saving user input

I know that capturing user input is already available.  That is amazing. It would be also great to be able to save it in a database for example.

-Better segmentation in flow (condition)

You can broadcast different messages to the users according to the segmentations. It would be great to use this in the actual funnel as well. When a user clicks on a button, the next step would be determined by a condition. For example, users who have already given their email addresses would see a different message compared to those who haven’t submitted this info yet.

Price, Support

ManyChat offers a free version, so it is really nice when starting out with chatbots. Easy to implement and no costs. I dig that. The free version comes with ManyChat branding (quite strong) and unlimited subscribers.

I recommend the Pro version, however. You can not only remove the branding but access powerful tools that are only available for pro users.
As far as I know, there are currently 3 functions that they don’t offer on their free plan. The question feature to capture your audience’s answers and 2 Growth tools: the Facebook Ads JSON creator and the Facebook Comments. Probably more are coming.

The pricing is really friendly as it is determined by the number of the users. So smaller businesses don’t have to pay much unless many people use the chatbot. It starts from $10/month up to 500 users.

Subscribers are people who message your page after you’ve deployed your bot. So you start from 0 and it seems like the unsubscribe rate on Messenger is higher than in email.
If you think about it as an email provider then the price is great. You should also have way higher return as you have more attention on Messenger than on email.

They seem to grow at an unexpected rate, as it takes the support sometimes 2 days to answer. It can be a bit of annoying, especially if there are some issues outside of your control.

Fortunately, the software is easy to use and also the help section can help you out with the basics. Hopefully, the support will be better with time.

 

Conclusion

Do you still remember the title of the article?

I think I can answer the question with a yes. It may change in the future, though.

If your primary goal now is to use the Messenger bot as a marketing channel, to generate leads, build up trust and close the sales, you can’t go wrong with ManyChat.

If you have a need for better customer service solution or integrations with your shop or CRM, you should look for other tools, and consider hiring a team of coders.

Personally, I really like the Growth Tools that help you capture audiences from many different channels. Let it be a link, a popup or a Facebook ad. That way you know which channel works the best and you can double down on it.

Click here if you want to take a look at other Messenger bot builder platforms as well.  

If you want to learn more about Chatbots and Messenger Marketing, join my free webinar.

 

 

Do you already use ManyChat? What is your favorite feature? Comment below!

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The Best 15 Free Facebook Messenger Bot Builder Platforms in 2017 – Without Coding Knowledge

You’ve seen these cool Facebook Messenger Chatbots and also want one for your Facebook page? But don’t know where to start and coding is none of your strengths?

Then go no further.

I’ve made the ultimate list of chatbot builders (platforms) that help you to make a Messenger bot in just a couple of minutes. If you are new to chatbots, read this intro article first.

Fortunately, there are many people just like me and you who are also interested in building their own chatbots. This growing demand is coming mostly from small business owners and marketers that don’t know how to code. As a consequence more and more companies try to enter this market and get a share of the growing pie. They all try to make it easy for you to just drag and drop your content without having to deal with the backend processes.

As a consequence more and more companies try to enter this market and get a share of the growing pie. They all try to make it easy for you to just drag and drop your content without having to deal with the backend processes.

In this article, I would like to list the best 15 of these bot building platforms.

Disclaimer:

I personally tested all these tools, but not actively use all listed here. So please take it into consideration when you choose your bot builder. Also, most of these tools have a freemium model and have some limitations for free users.

Having said that I try to write a bit of info about each builder. What I liked what I didn’t. Please note that there is no ranking here and I’m rather just listing the builders than describing them in detail. More detailed reviews will come soon as well.

Anyways, enough talk, let’s take a look at

 

My top 15 favorite Messenger Bot Building Platforms

1) Surveybot

As its name suggests the Surveybot has a clear focus on surveys. To the degree that it even allows you to not use your own Facebook page as the bot host. You can easily sign up with your FB account and also connect or create your FB page just by a button click. Actually, creating and connecting is not solved the best way. No biggie had to start the survey from zero after synchronizing my pages.

Some useful (survey) functions:

-if someone revisits, you can let them start the survey where they left off
-you can make the survey anonymous (could still look data in Facebook Page I guess)
– email notification after a completion
– multiple answer possibilities (with checkboxes in webviews)

 

You can choose the type of question you’d like to use.

 

Positive:

• Makes creating surveys very easy
• Offers great ways to collect and analyze data
• Easy implementation for creating posts or Messenger Code

 

Negative:

• Practically only good for surveys
• Only branded version

Example: their own bot, Surveybot

Overall, was a great experience using it, they offer a free branded solution as of now, looking to grow and integrate with CRM solutions.

2) Gupshup

Gupshup is a bot building platform that allows you to build your chatbot at a central place but publish it to different platforms. One can easily sign up with a Facebook or Github account and create the first bot fairly quickly.
In order to deploy the bot for platforms outside of Messenger, such as Google Now or Gmail, you cannot use the code-free bot building methods, unfortunately. Also, some of the functions are not available with the flow builder.

This is how Gupshup lets you craft the conversation.

 

Positive:

• premade bot templates for businesses
• opportunity to use interbot for ‘microbot’ integration

 

Negative: 

• No keyword function with the Flow builder
• No broadcasting functionality

 

Example: Hi Poncho  (was featured on F8 last year).

They are a bit ambiguous about their pricing, seems like small users can use the platform for free.

 

 

3) Chatfuel

Chatfuel is one of the biggest Messenger bot building platforms out there. It was mentioned during the F8 as well. It’s not a coincidence, they have an aggressive growth strategy with no brand removal option.

Also, they started out on Telegram already and have collected a huge amount of experience since then. Great options for building a Messenger or Telegram bot. The Russian team is actively listening to the user’s feedback and works on improvements.  I’ve actually created a template for them for conference/event chatbots.

This is how my template looks like in Chatfuel for an ‘imaginary chatbot conference’

 

Positive:

• Integration options such as Zapier or webhook
• Fast updates to Messenger changes
• Great amount of functions overall

Negative:

• No way to remove branding (for many it’s a deal breaker)
• Can be a bit complex to overview the whole interaction flow

 

Example: Techcrunch’s bot that delivers news from RSS feed in you Messenger.

They are a great platform and offer an only branded (free) version as of now. If you don’t mind that you can’t really go wrong with chatfuel.

 

4) ManyChat

ManyChat is also a very big Messenger bot builder. Similarly to Chatfuel it has its early experiences with Telegram and was prepared to the Messenger platform opening last year. It’s especially popular among marketers for its easy usage and segmentation functions. The support is so-so, takes a while to answer.

One of the most popular function of ManyChat is that it lets you send sequences and provides you valuable information

 

Positive:  

• Growth tools – they help you to get people into your Messenger funnel
• Live chat directly from ManyChat
• You can see the Click-through-Rate (CTR) on the buttons

Negative:

• No real integrations (just some RSS)
• Hard to have an overview

 

ManyChat is a great option for simple chatbots, the free version has unlimited users supply, but with ManyChat brand. If you want to get some of their growth tools and get rid of branding, pricing starts from $10 according to the subscribers.

 

5) Flow Xo

As its name suggests flows play a big part of this chatbot builder. I like that focus as a key part of chatbot design is keeping the user’s flow smooth and frictionless.

Without coding and massive interactions, only simple chatbots can be created. Therefore they usually have a clear task to do. Such as booking the room. The designer has to look at the whole interaction, not separated units.

 

One nice thing Flow Xo offers is the implementation of other platforms. The use of this chatbot builder can get quite technical fairly quickly, you should be able to think in terms of attributes.

Flow Xo’s visual flow builder

 

Positive:

• 5 platforms to deploy your bot to
• Great implementation opportunities such as Google Drive, Trello or Gmail
• Visual builder makes it easy to see the Flow

Negative: 

• The flow system brings limitation on the design
• No broadcasting

 

The free plan allows 5 bots and 500 interactions. Standard price starts at $19/month.

 

6) Motion.ai

Motion.ai is a bot builder platform where a team with different skill sets can work nicely together. The visual builder helps designers put up a nice flow for the bot. While modules such as Node.js enables developers to make more advanced stuff. Motion.ai has probably the best visual builder out there.

Similarly to Flow Xo, Motion.ai can also get quite technical, but one is able to build a chatbot without any programming knowledge for sure.

Motion.ai helps you visualize the user’s journey

 

Positive:

• Support for more platform such as SMS or Web
• Bot Store – one can share templates, so no need to start from scratch
• Active Community and help from stuff (in a Slack Channel)

Negative:

• Interface needs quite a bit of time to learn
• Brand removal only from Medium ($50/months) plan

 

The free version lets you build 2 chatbots, with a limit of 1000 messages.

 

7) Octane.ai

I subscribed to their waitlist already in November last year, so was happy when it opened its doors for me on the 1st of March.

You could say that is pretty late, and they have less experience, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that. One of the Co-Founders is Matt Schlicht who created Chatbots Magazine and the biggest chatbot group on Facebook.

A feature I really like allows you to see the statistics in the editor itself for every conversation you make.

Octane.ai shows you how many people saw the conversation and how many users read them

 

Positive:

• Great built in statistics
• Improving very dynamically
• Some great features such as Forms and Campaigns

Negative:

• All the flows show up automatically after your welcome message
• Hard to have an overview/edit some parts

 

Example: 50 cent bot

There is no information about the pricing, so I suppose the free plan is unlimited as of now (intense growth stage).

 

8) Parlo.io

The Marketing Executive, Ryan Helmstetler, is an early member of our Chatbot Marketing FB group, so I’m aware of this bot builder for quite a while.  Communication with the company is very good, a friend of mine also was able to sit down with them for a coffee in SF effortlessly.

Unfortunately, the lack of broadcasting in the free version made me not use it much. One can see that they are after bigger clients, agencies, as the middle package costs $400 per months. If someone is a heavy user, however, their integration and feature list look really promising.

Parlo’s visual builder to create chatbots

 

Positive:

• Great overview function for the flow (tree view)
• Good support

Negative:

• Strong limits on free plan (e.g- no broadcasting)
• Hard to save, no testing opportunity

 

The free plan allows you to send 2500 messages a month, packages start from $400/month with more features.

 

9) ItsAlive

I’ve known this platform for a while but didn’t test it up until recently. I knew there would be an update coming in April, so I was waiting for it. Now it’s May, so even the little things should be corrected by the French team after the update. Nice timing I would say.

You can choose different triggers for certain actions in ItsAlive

 

Positive:

• Lets you nicely categorize the different recipes
• Broadcast scheduling

Negative:

• No proper failure message when I set up something incorrectly and was expecting it to work
• Hard to have an overview and to connect recipes

 

Example: Web Summit Bot

ItsAlive  does not mention paid option on their page. I suppose priced options will come later on.

10) Leadflip

As its name already suggests, LeadFlip is focused on leads. Mainly in the Insurance and Finance sectors. After a nice onboarding, you can choose from 2 templates, Blank or Health insurance. Having 42 standard blocks to the health template is more than I expected, to be honest. Maybe that is a reason the finance template is still not in place though.

Leadflip did not spare with the blocks when creating their template

Positive:

• Great Builder overview
• Website as platform
• Easy data saving

Negative:

• No way to add rich media like images
• No broadcasting

 

They have a lead based pricing model, 50 leads per month are free, prices start from 50/month

11) Botsify

Botsify has been on my radar for a long time. As you can see on their feature list, they didn’t start yesterday. They also offer website integration for paid users. One of the things I’m most excited about is not deployed yet. Integrations with eCommerce stores such as Shopify or Woocommerce.

Botsify lets you match entities or user phrases

Positive:

• Overall great functions
• Powerful language learning ability

Negative:

• No gallery option
• No segmentation for message scheduling

 

The free plan includes 1 chatbot up to 100 unique users. Prices start at $10/month with website integration.

 

12) Api.ai

Probably not the platform that you would consider for non-techies. However, you can manage to build a chatbot on api.ai without any line of code. Does it have an easy way to deploy as the others before? –No, but everyone who can read and copy paste some lines can do it.

Google’s last year acquisition is probably the most popular NLP (Natural Language Processing) platform out there. Actually, you can connect it with other platforms already mentioned here only for it’s NLP function.

Api.ai’s language learning tool

 

Positive:

• Very powerful language understanding trainer
• Many platforms to deploy to – like Google Home, Skype or Twitter
• Great integration opportunities

Negative:

• No broadcasting
• Limited usage without coding or integrating with other software

 

Api.ai is free to use.

 

13) Chatteron

This platform is still in beta, but I think it has been open for quite a while. Anyways, a good visual builder makes it easier to have an overview on the bot. Chatteron offers a nice integration to monetize the bot via Radbots.

Positive:

• Funny looking but great visual builder
• Monetisation integration

Negative:

• No broadcasting
• No built-in testing interface

 

The free version has a limit of 15 000 messages/month, the business plan costs $0.001/message.

 

14) Morph.ai

Morph.ai is a great platform to build a Messenger or a website chatbot. It comes with built in small talk and overall a very good tool to have a great natural understanding for your bot.

The platform makes it easy to give the interaction over to a human and answer to the questions that surpassed the bots understanding capability.

Morph.ai creates this from the words that the bot uses. Just a fun addition.

Positive:

•  Advanced training and understanding modules
• Website integration possibility
• Advanced features like polls or forms

Negative:

• It can be hard to connect and overview the flow
• Limited targeting for broadcasting

 

Free plan is up to 1000 Messages a month, packages start at $49/month

 

15) Sequel

When I started to build chatbots, one of my ideas was to create a celebrity bot that can answer questions. My initial tests were on Sequel, one of the oldest bot builder platforms out there.

Within the bots you can create different units – so-called episodes – that come with a nice visual builder. That way you can easily separate (but also connect) different flows inside of one chatbot.

I’ve started to build a Ronaldo bot on Onesquel, but never really finished.

Positive:

• Opportunity to connect to many platforms such as Kik or Skype
• Great visual builder that lets you have a better overview of the user’s journey
• Useful features such as built-in poll or emoji support

Negative:

• Broadcasting function is a bit hard to manage, segment
• Couldn’t find how to set up persistent menu

 

OnSequel is a free platform, no information on pricing on the website.

 

That was my list of best 15 Messenger bot builder platforms out there. What are your thoughts? What is your favorite? Did I miss any? Comment below.

During my research, I tested quite a few more builder platforms.  I thought I would add them here as an extra. Who knows, they might catch up very soon, the market is very dynamic as you probably already noticed

Further Messenger Bot Builders

that didn’t make the list this time, but worth mentioning (they may later on…)

Rebotify

This beta bot builder platform has a strong start with its visual builder. Easy to understand and create a chatbot. Besides Messenger, they also provide you an opportunity to deploy the bot on Slack and the web (your browser). It seems that the Australian Rebotify only offers Text or Carousel units this time. Happy to see some improvements later on.

 

Converse.ai

I was amazed at the integration and channel options that converse.ai offers. Just to name some of them, Workplace as a channel and Mailchimp or Hubspot as integrations.

However, I was disappointed by the builder itself. Not that it is not good, it’s just not good for this list. It seems to be very powerful and I can see more techy persons gaining huge value from Converse.ai‘s bot building platform.

You can see how powerful it can be in the right hands

 

Firebot

The visual builder of Firebot looks actually really promising

The German company, Firebot.io welcomes us with a surprisingly nice visual builder for creating our chatbots. As I’m a fan of fast implementation I wanted to connect to my Facebook page to see how the flow goes. But I couldn’t. After giving the necessary permissions it just did not offer to choose a page.

Even though I appreciate the different name (Wiesn – is a reference for the famous October Fest of Munich), I just could not set it up.

Jumping over to Firefox did not help either, and I even tried Edge as well. Where is the German prezisität?
Anyways, should be an easy fix and I can see potential in this tool.

 

Reply.ai

It has a nice signup built inside a conversation on the website. So they start with qualifying the users.

Reply.ai seizes the opportunity to collect some data inside the on-boarding conversation flow

Most likely I’ve fallen under they non-target audience as of now by giving a small number of expected users.

„Thanks! We have added you to the waitlist for our self-service platform, which we plan to launch at the end of Q1.”

Anyways, will update on this one, once Reply.ai opens up its self-service platform.

 

Personify.ai

I created my first chatbot here in November 2016. Haven’t really used it since and was worried when I couldn’t log in now for writing my article. Internal server error [500] when I tried to log in, used different browsers as well. Blog hasn’t been updated this year. Not a biggie, but not the best signal to be honest. But tried a day later and it worked. The interface didn’t change (at least I didn’t notice).

Well, they haven’t answered my email for a week by now, also could not log in for a couple of days. So not sure what’s going on.
Anyways, I’ve found it positive that it lets you create White Label solutions for clients.
An example bot by Personify.ai is the @askelonmusk

Other Bot Builder Platforms I’ve tested:

Chattypeople

Recast.ai

Talkbot.io 

 

 

If you liked this article, please share it with others, so they don’t have to spend so much time looking for chatbot building platforms.

If you want to learn more about Messenger Marketing, register to my webinar in Messenger.

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