Do you remember a new visual assistant by Amazon called Echo Show? It has went on sale for the first time last week 🚚

According to the statistics, one of the most popular categories in the first sales week was food. Yea. Calorie counter Track by Nutritionix has added visuals telling you how many calories are in a food; OpenTable books restaurants; and you can now place Starbucks orders with the new visual interface. The reason of this popularity is simple - food sucks without visuals.

YouTube on Echo Show can also help you make a meal. Just say “Alexa, show me YouTube videos of how to cook macaroni and cheese” and up pops a series of choices. I’m sure that there will a plenty of other cooking and DIY apps with visual elements joining Alexa Store in the next couple of months.

Seems like Amazon have created a brand new platform with a huge potential. Again. Don’t miss your opportunity and start building skills for this super sexy platform 😉

https://venturebeat.com/2017/07/04/how-amazons-echo-show-can-change-how-you-cook-dinner/

Developer docs are available here: https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/docs/build-skills-for-echo-show

Silicon Valley is blown up by the latest news of famous VCs been involved in sexual harassment issues, so the topic is really serious right now. And bots are involved in it too.

In 2017 bots are already scheduling meetings, ordering meals, and analyzing bank accounts. They’re now well on their way to becoming our full-time virtual assistants. That means they must now suffer the indignities unethical bosses inflict on their human assistants, especially sexual harassment.

And the problem is really huge, according to the statistics of a couple of bot platforms about 5% of interactions in their database are categorized as clearly sexually explicit, although he believes the actual number is far higher due to the difficulty of identifying them automatically.

The article below covers different problems and implications related to sexual topic bot developers including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft face on a daily basis.

https://qz.com/818151/virtual-assistant-bots-like-siri-alexa-and-cortana-spend-much-of-their-time-fending-off-sexual-harassment/

Hey botmakers,

I have HUGE news.

Our awesome-bots repo on Github has recently passed 650 stars!

It’s literally the biggest resource about bots so far, and I’m so pumped to get positive feedback about it every day.

We updated a few topics there, such as Analytics, Bot directories and tools for Customer service.

More sub topics to come 🙂

https://github.com/BotCube/awesome-bots

Are you building voice bots for Alexa?

If not, you’re missing a big opportunity out there.

Alexa has now passed 15,000 skills, with 3x increase from last September.

What’s interesting here is that most popular skills are still Flash Briefings — voice-activated news pieces from different publications.

Comparing to other platforms, Alexa is much ahead. Google Home has just 378 voice apps available as of June 30, and Microsoft’s Cortana has only 65.

You should definitely bet on Alexa as business or bot developer.

Right now the quality of bots out there is not so good, and it’s a big opportunity.

Don’t wait until it will be great.

Don’t wait until every business will be there.

Start building now.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/03/amazons-alexa-passes-15000-skills-up-from-10000-in-february/

Wish you had Slack’s brain?

Now, you can have it sitting in front of your laptop.

Slack recently published all best practices they have collected in building conversational interfaces for business bots use cases.

They’re giving away literally 99,9% of their bot hacks.

Just grab this link to your bookmarks, dig into it, and boost your business bots.

It’s that easy.

https://api.slack.com/best-practices

I thought a lot about our #botoftheweek section.

Then it hit me.

I need to make a guide out of every successful case we go through at #botoftheweek.

Why?

Because there are dozens of unique approaches and features hidden in products I share every week, and it would be not fair if I keep that golden chest away from you.

Starting today, every #botoftheweek post is a Medium publication with highlighted insights and key features of every bot, explained in details.

I’m sure it will bring a lot more value to this community to get what’s under the hood of these products.

And the first one is right here 🙂

https://medium.com/@flreln/emily-bot-review-botoftheweek-28-a2f82124fb52

Smart speaker market has been growing in the shadow for the last 2 years.

And then this happened.

There’s something called the law of diffusion of innovation.

And if you don’t know the law, you definitely know the terminology.

The first 2,5% of our population are innovators.

They have this crazy motivation to buy the latest iPhone or any other product right when it comes to market, because they just love to be first.

The next 13,5% of our population are our early adopters.

The next 34% are our early majority, late majority and our laggards.

“The only reason these people buy touch-tone phones is because they can't buy rotary phones anymore” — (c) Simon Sinek

The law of diffusion of innovation tells us is that if you want mass-market success or mass-market acceptance of an idea, you cannot have it until you achieve this tipping point between 15 and 18 percent market penetration, and then the system tips.

Guess where we stand with smart speakers?

For the last month we passed 10-12%.

We’re reaching the tipping point.

This is going to be awesome to watch this market unfolds 🙂

https://www.recode.net/2017/7/6/15929026/smart-speaker-market-voice-activated-assistant-amazon-echo-home-samsung-alibaba

Slack has got a great update today!

Now users can find apps in the sidebar, right under their direct messages and Slack channels.

They’ve also refreshed what users see when they interact one-on-one with a bot. Now there’s an About tab, showcasing the bot’s product screenshots, video, and description from its App Directory listing.

“Only bots appear in the sidebar for now, but you could imagine how this space could function for all types of apps. Apps could use it as an onboarding space for new users, as an inbox space for notifications, or as a dashboard to manage a trial or billing period. It’s a new canvas for future app functionality.”

Kudos to all Slack devs!

https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/giving-apps-a-new-home-in-slack-daa2ba3a75ed

Do you love interesting cases about Messenger marketing?

Of course you do 🙂

And I have one more for you today.

Tommy Hilfiger, the fashion brand with $6.6 billion in sales last year, added a chatbot that operates within autoplay video ads.

The bot simply invites you to engage directly by clicking a time-sensitive greeting that's overlaid upon the video.

Then it asks you a series of questions about fashion tastes and sizes, and selects some products for you.

Selected products are then automatically transferred to Tommy.com for users to purchase.

That’s it.

I’m sure, when they’ll add native payments, it’s gonna be really big.

http://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/06/27/tommy-hilfiger-tries-teads-outstream-video-chatbot-size

Wow, that's interesting.

"Amazon is mulling a far-reaching policy change that would give Alexa developers access to raw transcripts of what people say when using Alexa applications."

It could be a big win developers, but there are a lot of privacy concerns, because your conversations could be accessible by some skills maker 🤔

I do not care about my privacy a lot (Google knows everything, lol), but there are a lot of people who do.

Do you care about privacy in voice assistants as a user?

https://www.engadget.com/2017/07/12/amazon-developers-private-alexa-transcripts/

Peter Buch from Swelly (https://www.swell.wtf/) says hi to our community!

Hey guys,

Just wanted to thank you for being here.

It was a fabulous 6 months journey from 0 to 1354 followers and I believe we can double this number in next 3 months.

We are working hard to provide you with the best content from this space every day, and it’s so exciting to see how we are growing together.

Our next milestone is to put more effort into writing guides, how-to's, and original content for you.

Also you will see Q&As with top people from bot space, famous founders, experts and investors.

And there's one more thing.

We're launching something new very soon.

Let's keep it in secret for a little, but I promise, you'd love to join it.

Happy Botting! ❤️

Messenger chat extensions are new, but already became popular.

The biggest problem is that nobody knows how to design them.

Why does it matter?

Because if you’re not seeing the final user experience, it’s hard to understand whether you’re moving in the right direction or not.

That’s why I’m so pumped to share this.

Facebook has updated their Messenger Platform Design Kit.

They renewed the template, added chat extensions, web views, new generic menu, and many more elements.

And now it’s a must for every bot designer.

http://facebook.design/messengerkit

P.S Cool guys from Botsociety recently published a step-by-step gem on how to design the chat extension using their platform.

Definitely worth checking out too.

https://journal.botsociety.io/2017/07/design-preview-facebook-chat-extension/

Today's #botoftheweek is kinda special.

Why is that?

Because it's not just one bot. It's 1000 bots.

Last year Joshua Browder launched DoNotPay, which is a bot that helps people fight their parking tickets.

He got big media coverage because the service already saved people $9.3 million disputing 375,000 parking tickets.

Could you imagine?

Now he's pushing out 1,000 new bots that can assist people in filling out transactional legal forms in all 50 U.S. states and the U.K.

That's huge.

Why did he do this?

As Joshua added new capabilities to his DoNotPay bot, many early users started to become confused about what the bot could actually be used for.

That’s the main reason he decided to release as many legal assistance features as possible, branding them as a full-service consumer legal tool.

I personally think this is a brilliant idea because people are not struggling to find the right tool anymore.

And the bot itself is a fantastic case study for why people should care about AI, even if it’s not revolutionary on the tech side.

P.S this one is not a Medium post as I told you a week ago because at the moment I have no access to the bot to test it. Looking forward to getting it very soon 🙂

https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/12/donotpay-launches-1000-new-bots-to-help-you-with-your-legal-problems/

Would you like to see an interview with Joshua Browder, the creator of DoNotPay bot?

Thumbs up to make that happen! 👍

Also, send questions you’d like to ask Joshua to our @botcubechat using #donotpayama hashtag.

We’ll choose best and answer them in the interview 🙂

Last week Facebook redesigned ads in Messenger.

It’s super cool for bot developers and business owners, especially if targeting is done correctly.

Simply say, it’s one more powerful tool to drive audience to your bot, right as conversational ads on Facebook, but more native.

But yeah, they are pretty big and a little bit annoying at the moment.

Love this phrase from TechCrunch:

“Why so big? Did the ad department say they couldn’t sell anything that didn’t completely take over the app? Did they not want to ask for smaller assets after asking for ones at this size to begin with? Do they think people like ads as much as ad people do?”

But I do think it’s a way to go, we have to start from something and then incrementally improve it over time.

What do you think about Messenger ads?

https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/11/facebooks-messenger-ads-are-bad-and-must-be-destroyed/

Following up on the topic, I do believe more in contextual recommendations Facebook announced on the last F8.

“As M gets smarter, it will start making recommendations for chat extensions built by developers!” — David Marcus.

Just think about it for a second.

Your cinema bot could be discovered right in the middle of a conversation about going to the cinema.

Isn’t that awesome?

More on that topic in my April’s post about F8, might be useful for you guys who haven’t seen it yet 🙂

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/the-most-complete-report-on-what-facebook-messenger-has-launched-on-f8-d43aa88f9c0c

Have you ever tried to come up with a list of bot building platforms?

I did.

If you’re an agency, or a bot platform startup, or a freelancer, or a designer, or just a person who is interested in bots you definitely have to research these platforms and understand them.

I made a list by myself and then discovered this awesome public google sheet, that has all the platforms and updates regularly.

Enjoy!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bKR7qQlLMP1cL1vYkPWy0pN02EMrJsbPUguFS-_0bcE/edit#gid=0

Just found this awesome list of Best AI and chatbot conferences in 2017.

You know what to do ;)

https://blog.standuply.com/best-ai-and-chatbot-conferences-in-2017-55f020acb782

Wish you had access to my private presentation about bot UX from my last talk in Munich?

It already helped tens of companies to improve their bots, set up a solid design process and fix some critical mistakes in products they build.

Here you go: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByKk5oBGxNttUXpYT0tmdmNmclU

Because I love you guys 🙂