VentureBeat’s Bots Channel tracks the most important news and analysis from the exploding fields of bots and messaging. Each week, we select the top stories and present them in in our free weekly newsletter, BotBeat. We include news stories by VentureBeat staff, guest articles from leading figures in the bots community, and posts from a wide variety of other outlets. You can subscribe to our BotBeat newsletter to receive this information in your inbox every Thursday.
Here’s this week’s newsletter:
Last week, the center of gravity for the bots ecosystem alighted at Betaworks botcamp in New York for a demo day. Eight companies demonstrated their bots before scores of people drawn from throughout the bot ecosystem. Several panels and onstage interviews tackled issues known and emerging. For instance, General Catalyst‘s Spencer Lazar led a discussion on productivity bots and Sam Mandel of Poncho, Jon Steinberg of Cheddar, and Cam Burley of Bites addressed the role of bots in media today.
Some of the takeways, as noted by Lylan Masterman, include the growing ease of use of bots, the enormous potential of Apple’s iMessage platform, and a recognition that “bots are great for jumping into the deep link of a decision tree,” directly routing customers to the help they seek based on one-word queries.
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Botcamp host and Betaworks chief executive John Borthwick spoke with Chris Messina, developer experience lead at Uber, who invented the hashtag and has helped popularize the phrase “conversational commerce.” In a conversation that touches on the challenges for bot discovery, the need for bots to be fun, and the importance of voice “bots” like Alexa, Borthwick and Messina pointed to the beginnings of a fundamental shift in the way computers and humans interact. Instead of humans altering their communication to talk to computers, bots are making it possible for computers to understand humans as they are. The full video is below:
As always, please send along any news tips to Khari Johnson or guest post submissions to John Brandon. Please visit our Bots Channel to enjoy full coverage of the bots and messaging ecosystem. Thank you.
— Blaise Zerega
Editor in Chief
From the Bots Channel
How Pullstring’s Jessie Humani bot went from being white to a woman of color
EXCLUSIVE: When Jessie Humani made its debut in April, it was a young white woman with straight reddish-brown hair in a tank top and pair of sunglasses. About a month ago she became a racially ambiguous young woman with hoop earrings, curly hair, and a nose ring. I see and experience new bots daily. Occasionally early in their life […]
The moral responsibility of A.I.
Having established that we are light years away from full artificial intelligence, and that true A.I. is an inevitable part of the present and future — now what? What should we concern ourselves with next? Like any transformative technology, A.I. carries risks and presents challenges along several dimensions, with the most complex and urgent issue being […]
Microsoft’s bot platform is more popular than Facebook’s among developers
More than 45,000 developers are now using the Microsoft BotFramework, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Monday. This makes it one of the most popular ways to create a bot, in part because of its versatility. The Microsoft Bot Framework allows bots and machine learning programs to be created not only for Skype but also for […]
What Google Allo’s launch means for chatbots
I have high hopes for this one. While Google Allo is still fresh off the starting block, it could become the most significant chatbot messaging platform ever. Of course, for now, it does not even allow third-party participation. It’s fairly limited, and it has an uphill climb if it is going to replace WhatsApp or […]
Why LinkedIn sees messaging (and bots) as the next frontier for networking
On the heels of LinkedIn’s 10-year anniversary, I explored the company’s progress from yet another social network to one that impacted the way we worked. In the years since, LinkedIn has accelerated efforts to advance our professional careers and has shifted from being just a place where we connected to one aimed at facilitating education […]
Related coverage
Messaging Apps Are Changing How Companies Talk with Customers
Welcome to the era of “conversational commerce,” the term for online business that’s powered by natural language technologies. With a combination of rich visual interfaces and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies from Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others, brands can scale relevant, personal, and helpful interactions with customers. (via Harvard Business Review)
Operator harnesses chatbots, humans, and $15M to sell US goods to China
With a little personal shopping assistance, Operator thinks Chinese citizens will pounce on American products sold through its conversational shopping app. The promise of becoming the guided commerce layer connecting China with the US has earned the two-year-old a $15 million series B round at a $100 million pre-money valuation. (via TechCrunch)
The Essential Things you need to know about the ChatBots and Conversational Apps
Imagine after a bad breakup you engage with a virtualized human medium to share your feelings. It acts empathetic to your situation and suggests some weekend getaways that might help cheer you up. The same medium could book that getaway for you immediately and suggest a few outfits that will make look great on. (via LinkedIn)
5 things you didn’t know about Amazon’s ‘Alexa’
Amazon’s Echo has become a sleeper hit thanks to tasks its digital assistant Alexa can carry out. There’s probably more you could do with it. (via USA Today)
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