(2016-10-05) Talkabot Conference Liveblog Slack Platform

Matt Haughey Talkabot conference liveblog – Slack.com Platform Blog

Part 1:

By the end of the conference I felt like I got to attend a 1978 homebrew computer club meeting. It also reminded me of SXSW 2000, where I sat on the first panel about weblogs and got a front row seat to watching tech history get made

Ben Brown greeted us

Ben walked through the basic controller scripts of Howdy’s Botkit.

Later, Ben unveiled Howdy’s new Botkit Studio

Essentially, it’s like a content management system for all the text a bot shares in conversations.

You couldn’t build a bot completely from scratch in this web UI, but it was unique in that a programmer could build the basic interactions and leave the bot copy for a UI Writer to refine directly in a web browser.

Don Goodman-Wilson from Slack gave an overview of how to think about designing bots,

Tao Jiang from Facebook unveiled new tools around payments and messaging

Steve Ickman from Microsoft talked about their ambitious project to create a uniform bot authoring/hosting toolkit, one where about 80% of bot functionality could be made available on Skype, Slack, Facebook, Kik, and others.

Dennis Yang from Dashbot spoke about how they built a game system but had no way of tracking usage, so they built their own analytic tools that they eventually spun into a product

Part 2:

Ben Brown, Howdy/BotKit/Talkabot

Facebook Messenger

Poncho

trying to make weather fun

Content: going from weather, to horoscopes, to eventually things like daily comics.

Erika Hall, Design with Words

*She shared goals for bots: They should give just enough info, be truthful, be relevant, be brief and orderly, and unambiguous.

“Don’t make people think. Language is a social phenomena, just as apps are a social phenomena now too, design interactions by having conversations, real interactions. Prototype your bot by talking over a table with another person*

Christian Brucculeri, CEO Snaps.com https://snaps.io/

Jordan’s Training Breakfast Club looked like a set of well-designed notifications to get your daily morning workouts ready. They ping you in the morning, then ask you how it went hours after, and they iterated for months to get the interactions right. The audience was elite high school athletes and they loved it. 2018-01-24-JordanBreakfastClubTrainingChatbotTheShortyAwards

Kip and the Visual Language of Bots

Esther Crawford, Why You Need a Personal Bot

Wrote a bot about herself when looking for a job, and loaded it with personal stories,

Olabot is her product that lets you build your own Facebook Messenger bot about yourself. Their goals are to give everyone a bot, make them conversational, work on every platform, and be easy to train. “Continuous onboarding” is the process where they quiz you constantly about your life and your answers get built into the bot. Bots are a natural evolution of the personal profile, capture stories, interests, and voice.

Drew Magliozzi of AdmitHub, conversational AI for college education success

*Drew builds bots for students to get through college, primarily SMS.

The problem: 14% of students don’t show up on the first day of class and never end up attending even after being accepted.*

Tom Hadfield message.io, Building Multi-platform Bots

Conversation with Ted Livingston, CEO Kik

“Chat is the new web, bots are the new browsers”

Hipmunk CEO — “Hipmunk bot is better than the mobile website, maybe even better than hipmunk’s own mobile app.”

Barbara Ondrisek, hipster cat bot

Lauren Golembiewski, antisocial software

“Ghost for Burner” is a bot to help women get rid of jerks, as it takes over your account and texts them for you.

Sam Williams, Delivering the News with Bots

Sam talked about the Quartz app. They really wanted to focus the app on iOS notifications. There was an option of making it a blank screen app that only operated as notifications

they had to rewrite content for the platform

They looked for existing CMSes. They basically needed to build a “choose your own adventure” content system, but for News. They started with Twine to manage news conversations and built out their own CMS to let writers edit copy without having to touch code.

Part 3:

Using Location Data with Marsbot from Foursquare

Rob Guilfoyle, Abe.ai

Andy Mauro, Voice Recognition at automat.ai

Amir Shevat, State of the Slack Platform

Second half of Amir’s talk is more philosophical. He asks: How do we experience products?

API.ai with Ilya Gelfenbeyn, building bots that understand users

Their big clients: Abe.ai and Statsbot for Slack uses them. Techcrunch and Forbes both have bots that use their backend too.

Stephen Scarr, CEO eContext, Smarter Bots through Semantic Classification

Sarah Wulfeck & Lucas Ives designers of talking barbie, PullString

Projects: Hello Barbie is a bot. They wrote over 8,000 lines of dialogue, she can talk for 30hrs without repeating a phrase. Can keep track of the names of your pets, siblings, know what your interests are, etc. They had to build a conversational neural network for Barbie.

DC Collier learning from WeChat.

Mitch Mason, IBM Watson: from the show Jeopardy to the future

Robert Hoffer, Smarter Child creator