Building a good CuratorBot required no coding skills. But a great CuratorBot needs faceted search. Can it be done without programming? - second instalment of Adventures of a non-Coder in the World of Chatbots…

By the end of this tutorial, you will have built a fully functional food ordering bot using our new feature: the Bot Builder. Bot Builder helps you design complex flows for your bots quickly and easily

... fears about how changing technology is affecting the quality of information and the state of our democracy. ... heated debate about the role and size of tech platforms and the extent to which their activities should be regulated. Artificial Intelligence (AI) takes over from mobile as the hottest topic in technology...Expect widespread innovati…

For content curators, adding a CuratorBot on Facebook Messenger is a no-brainer. The alpha testing launched in late December was useful, resulting in a whole bunch of tweaks, as described in this post for Chatbot Magazine.

It’s not about bots. It’s not about artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, natural language processing ... It’s about solving a problem for your customer... Stop building bots, start building experiences... Nobody uses and returns to your product or service because it’s a bot, an app, or a website. They return because you’re s…

my research team’s analysis of data from Columbia University’s Emergent rumor tracker suggests that this misinformation is just as likely to go viral as reliable information... limiting news fakers’ ability to sell ads... a step in the right direction. But it will not curb abuses driven by political motives... Using BotOrNot, our colleagues found…

If you think this election is insane, wait until 2020... technologies like AI, machine learning, sensors and networks will accelerate. Political campaigns get ... so personalized that they are scary in their accuracy and timeliness. The single most important factor influencing your voting decision is your social network… so you can bet that politi…

Spectrm is one of the first ventures that allows publishers to create and manage so-called chatbots for delivering content to audiences over messaging platforms including Facebook Messenger, Slack and Telegram... niche articles, only available on certain publications, seem to be more popular than general news that’s widely available elsewhere... …

When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence... Memorial bots ... seemed both inevitable and dangerous. ... is it really what’s beneficial for us? Is it letting go, by forcing you to actually feel everything? Or is it just having a dead person in your attic? ... Today’s bots remain imperfect mimics ... Any suggestion …

This idea is counterintuitive for us bot-developers because it seems to go against the whole idea of natural language processing.But I quickly realized that suggesting questions was really important... who wants to physically type out an entire question?.. SelenaBot ... also does a quiz ... shows you tour dates, social media updates, lets you lis…

“We were keen to test on small niche audience... Bots will work better when they are more targeted.”... On the transfer deadline day ... 43 percent of chatbot subscribers clicked through ... On an average day ... closer to 23 percent. engagement is high because an individual is choosing to engage with it and the experience is ... personal... ca…

Within five years robots and so-called intelligent agents will eliminate many positions in customer service, trucking and taxi services, amounting to 6 percent of jobs... The bots of 2021 will be much better at understanding human language, and they will be better at learning from users and increasingly able to handle more complex scenarios.

Most bots today are a simple one and done... draw a crowd, people play with them temporarily only to disregard them minutes later... a huge opportunity for those of us who can create a remarkable experience... Here are a couple of insights:

Instead of pushing news, it’s going to gather news. ... It’s not only going to tell you funny, interesting, and insightful stuff. (Although it will.) It’s also going to ask questions... depending on whether you’re a conventiongoer, a protester, or watching along at home. And it will use those reactions and inbound information to inform BuzzFeed Ne…

to connect with protesters and delegates on the ground ... and to experiment with what it looks like to deploy a bot as a reporting assistant.Now we’re delighted to share the code behind it:

One of the most critical elements to creating a great bot is copywriting. The right words can keep your users engaged for hours while the wrong ones will leave them running for the hills... Your chatbot should have a single minded focus and anything that does not adhere to this focus should be stripped away.

so far, there has been no killer bot... we’re only four months into this... I believe we’ll look back on the early emphasis on “conversational commerce” as a mistake... natural language processing and artificial intelligence are not yet accomplished at managing human-like conversations... instant interactions are key.

some examples of a blended interface, bringing the best of the command line and GUI paradigms together... — notifications and quick input from the conversational side, along with a rich and intuitive experience from the GUI side... Each message has the potential to be a ,,, bite size applications like a photo carousel, media players, mini games, i…

This is the future of mobile news, as Quartz envisions it. In the app, which launches today and is Quartz’s first, you don’t read the news; you chat with it.

chatbots and other conversational services should be given the right to link to websites without the threat of legal action.

Here are some considerations if you are thinking of building a conversational product or weaponizing an existing product for the bot age.

AI can be effective, particularly its Natural Language Processing (NLP) aspect — but only in the right context... we need to work out when it’s a help and when it’s a hindrance... Whilst AI may be the new kid on the technological block, it works best as a complement to good UI, not a substitute.

The feed is dying, and we feel shocked by its death — but we shouldn’t... imagine a library organized chronologically, or even the morning edition of a newspaper... the curated feed ... can, theoretically, eliminate posting anxiety, find the people you want to talk to (and the people you want to hear from) and make the experience of posting feel …

Facebook introduced new APIs for messaging through Facebook Messenger. ... bots are legitimately cool and promise to revolutionize how we interact with services. And it’s a piece of cake to get one up and running.

I haven’t yet met a single bot that actually does ANYTHING better than a great UX... that actually does ANYTHING beyond a narrow scripted interaction. They all seem OK inside a script (in English), but become super-annoying very fast, when moving out of their pre-designed limits. So I decided to deploy a chatbot, without building one, just to see …

When a Vox Media Slack user sends a direct message to simbot specifying a seed article URL and a number of desired results, then the bot would return a ranked list of articles that are most similar in content to the article found in the provided URL. two main applications for the bot ... enable editors ... on social media... to discover related…

You can now chat with all sorts of bots through a number of messaging services... The trouble is that computers still have a hard time understanding human language... but chatbots are still prone to confusion and misunderstanding... The best commercial chatbots will most likely be those that recognize their own limitations... There have been no …

Picture a nightmarish future in which half-witted “conversational user interfaces” drive us insane with mindless conversation and misunderstandings...chatbots may be incredibly annoying. And things may be even more annoying if app designers fail to appreciate the significant challenges that remain with using computers to parse and respond to natur…

bandwagons are bad for your health, as illustrated by the impending death of content marketing and the gathering backlash against Slack (Slacklash? BackSlacksh?) and (already!?) chatbots.

What are chatbots? Why are they such a big opportunity? How do they work? How can I build one? How can I meet other people interested in chatbots?