We have awesome news 💪

Amazon and Microsoft just released an update for their voice assistants. Now you can speak with Alexa on a Windows 10 PC, you just need to say "Cortana, open Alexa"
This is opening a whole new market for Alexa. Looking forward what is going to be next🤓

https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/15/alexa-cortana-public-preview/

Have you ever wondered how to pick a great skill invocation name?

Here you go 🙂

https://medium.com/storyline-blog/how-to-pick-a-skill-invocation-name-c12037b29ebb

Everyone makes mistakes, even big companies.

Today YC by mistake sent acceptances to everyone who applied to their Startup School, even if they weren't selected for the program.

To cover this fault, they opened the program for everyone who applied.

What lesson should we learn? Be careful when you make a broadcast to your users, the other way it can be a pretty expensive mistake!

Hot news🔥🔥🔥

Slack just raised $427 million in their new round and now it worth more than 7 billion!

https://www.producthunt.com/news/315-slack-raises-a-427-million-series-h?utm_source=browser_notification&utm_medium=browser_notification&utm_campaign=315-slack-raises-a-427-million-series-h

Today we decided to make a small digest of what happened for the last two days.

Facebook is on fire! FB decided to show the world a piece of information regarding its own speech recognition feature "Aloha" for Facebook and Messenger apps: https://voicebot.ai/2018/08/21/first-sighting-of-the-facebook-aloha-voice-assistant-appears-in-messenger-along-with-voice-messaging-in-instagram/

Maybe new Alexa competitor? What do you think?

Google Assistant’s latest feature delivers just the ‘good news’😇 Just say "Hey Google, tell me something good" to receive your daily dose of stories about people who are solving real-life problems: https://www.blog.google/products/assistant/hey-google-tell-me-something-good/

And one more news related to Facebook:
Facebook’s advertising platform permits discrimination by removing 5,000 options that can be used to exclude certain religious and ethnic minority groups: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/21/facebook-is-removing-over-5000-ad-targeting-options-to-prevent-discriminatory-ads/

A few weeks ago, our friend Julian from CognitionX shared his research in chatbots and voice bots market.
Highly recommend to read it🤓

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Kfo-w7BlE0a0AYAZ7Lm_qNJv_UNkRLzc/view

Have you seen this cute puppy?

I'm sure, pretty soon this nice animals like Aibo will receive lots of features characteristic to voice assistants and will become very popular within the next 5 years.

https://tcrn.ch/2Lo8IUD

Would you buy Google Assistant for $2000? Or maybe Alexa for $400?
Here are two articles about interesting collaboration Amazon and Google with producers of musical equipment

Google
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/23/bang-olufsens-pricey-beosound-line-gets-google-assistant/

Amazon
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/8/28/17790932/bose-home-speaker-500-soundbar-700-announced-pricing-features

Samsung is opening up Bixby to third-party developers this November

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/04/samsung-bixby-software-developers-kit-sdk.html

btw, a month ago Samsung announced their first home speaker powered by Bixby.

https://thenextweb.com/tech/2018/08/09/samsung-debuts-its-funky-galaxy-home-bixby-powered-speaker/

Have you ever seen how people beg in China?
You just need to scan the QR code and choose the amount of money you want to transfer.

Excuses like "I don't have cash" don't work anymore😐

Alexa is going to become a Kinect replacement for Xbox One.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/6/17826718/microsoft-xbox-one-alexa-features-support-voice-control

We saw the news about voice interface in VR games before, but consoles like Xbox are brand new field for voice.

Just remembered Skyrim promo video for E3.

Maybe it wasn't a joke at all?

This beautiful map shows everything that powers an Amazon Echo, from data mines to lakes of lithium

https://anatomyof.ai/

Google Home Mini became the best-selling smart speaker👑

Google sold 2.3 million Home mini devices in Q2 2018, according to a new report from Strategy Analytics. Amazon sold 2.2 Echo dots for the same period of time.

Last year the situation was completely different!

More stats in the article below

https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/19/google-home-mini-was-the-best-selling-smart-speaker-in-q2/

Yesterday Salesforce announced Einstein Voice. The main goal of this extension is to translate voice to text and log that information into Salesforce. This will save a huge amount of time when you need to manually fill the form.

In addition to the Voice Assistant, Salesforce announced that customers can build their own voice bots on the Einstein Bot Platform. Einstein Voice Bots will be in open pilot in June 2019.

https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-einstein-voice-ai-assistant-2018-9

Love this news😇😇

Small startup from London made an AI-powered chatbot and raised $10M series A.

The bot named Cleo and his goal is to replace your banking app. Just four months after the launch Cleo claiming more than 600,000 active users in the U.K., U.S. and Canada in total + it is adding 30,000 new signups each week.

Here is the bot: http://m.me/1027621033925129

https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/20/cleo-meet-balderton/

This week Facebook will announce their first smart speaker.

It will be powered by ALEXA👑🔥

https://voicebot.ai/2018/09/24/facebook-portal-smart-display-to-be-announced-this-week-will-have-alexa-onboard/

We found a 💎

Deakin University develops digital assistant which can answer 6 000 questions! They working on it since 2014 and the aim is to automate 20 000 questions!

Study case: http://www.umsl.edu/~lacitym/LSEOUWP1704.pdf

Assistant overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsRPuU53E74

📢Berlin is going to host the biggest conference about bots next month, called Chatbot Summit.

We decided to summarize 5 reasons why you should take part in it:
1. There is going to be the biggest concentration of people from the sphere.
2. Lots of useful insights and discussions about trends in 2019. Knowledge = money!
3. You can personally meet the leaders of such companies as Smooch, Chatbase, Twilio, Botsociety and many others.
4. Sharing knowledge with people from your sphere, drinking tasty German beer! What can be better than this? 🍻☺️
5. Meet the BotCube team! Yes, we're also going to Berlin and we will be glad to see you there too 😉

You can find more information on the conference website https://www.chatbotsummit.com/

Use the promo code "Botcube15" to get a 15% discount on tickets.