VentureBeat’s Bots Channel tracks all the important and interesting news related to the exploding field 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 a good number of 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:
We’ll see the first bot IPOs in the next two or three years, Phil Libin told me when I visited him recently. Libin, of course, is a leading figure in the bots community who joined venture capital firm General Catalyst Partners a year ago and already has made five investments in bot companies. As an investor, Libin is bullish, as you’d expect. But he was also conscious of the challenges facing the current bot ecosystem. “Right now there’s a lot of fart bots,” he said, almost apologetically. “None of which are meant to be substantive. They’re there because developers want to see what it’s like to write one and ask: What does it feel like? What are the analytics that I can get? How many people will discover it? You’re not supposed to take them seriously.”
Libin was speaking about the relatively trivial bots that do things like order pizza, check the weather, or send flowers. In his view, bot startups need to satisfy three criteria in order to have a chance at becoming a viable, independent company:
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- A company’s bot (or bots) must solve a real problem, not a manufactured one.
- The bot cannot be just an app replacement.
- The bot should help multiple people have a conversation among themselves, with the bot providing functionality and structure in-line to that conversation.
The first two criteria eliminate perhaps 99 percent of bots today, Libin estimates. And while there are many variables for a startup seeking funding and then building a sustainable, profitable business (let alone going public), Libin’s criteria are clearly a good place to start when thinking about the value being created by bots. Our full interview with Libin is available here.
Thanks to everyone who has visited our revamped Bots Channel and sent us feedback. We continue to make improvements, so please keep the suggestions coming via email. And as always, please share your ideas for guest posts with John Brandon, and send story tips to Khari Johnson.
— Blaise Zerega
Editor in Chief
P.S. We hope you enjoy this video of Robert “The Botfather” Hoffer as he argues that bots need personality and soul.
From the Bots Channel
The bigger implications of Apple’s machine learning technology
Today, all eyes are on Apple. The company has long been hailed as a leader in technology, and we’ve seen many interesting developments come out of the Cupertino office, especially today, with the news about the new iPhone 7. Though there are plenty of new updates and products, there’s also the question of what goes on behind the scenes to […]
5 chatbot stats that reveal what users want
We at Dashbot.io recently surpassed 32 million messages processed! Given three months worth of data processed, we wanted to highlight some interesting findings. (The stats below are based on Facebook Messenger bots only.) The average messages per session and time per session across all bots jumped quite a bit from June to July and appears […]
Cisco doesn’t want Spark to be like Slack. Here’s why
Joseph Fu is part of a team at Cisco building Spark, an enterprise messenger app that seeks to overtake the likes of Yammer, Skype, and Hipchat, and eventually, to dethrone Slack from its early leadership position. In less than two years, Slack has gone from a little-known gaming chat company to an enterprise darling valued at $3.8 billion […]
Facebook’s Seth Rosenberg on bots, business, and the future of Messenger
With all the chatter and hype that surround bots, artificial intelligence, and conversational commerce, it can be hard to remember that there’s very little percolating today on chat platforms (with their billions of users) that didn’t exist a year ago. Since CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would open its platform to bot makers, businesses, and […]
2 big reasons Facebook Messenger is the wrong platform for chatbots
While chatbots have been around since the early 1990’s, this is the year they became completely synonymous with Facebook Messenger. Facebook brought automated, chat-based customer service into the mainstream at a time when businesses and buyers are obsessed with improving the customer experience. This technology will be transformative. It’s part of a wave of innovations that is […]
Chatbots are a creation channel for storytelling
I worked at Betaworks this past summer. Pursuing an opportunity to work there was probably one of the best decisions I have ever made. The experiences were invaluable, and I have already documented two of the major lessons I picked up (Permission vs Advice and Influence vs Authority). A highlight of the summer was getting to work on the botcamp program at Betaworks. My […]
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