Bot! zine - Issue #40

In an email to VentureBeat today, CEO Van Miranda said the company is shutting down because it was “unable to secure additional investment beyond Slack Fund and a few angel investors.”

With journalists at The Washington Post, BuzzFeed and The Associated Press using bots to automate reporting, there remains some confusion about who gets credit for a story produced by a bot.

“The best thing about bots is they never get tired, bored, or upset. They have infinite energy, whereas humans need to take breaks to take care of ourselves.”

We know they’re here, near, and dear. We also know this space is new (again), and that adoption of bots by businesses and the general…

Where did Viola13 want me to go?

This will be a small article on how to approach bots, and how to use them properly. As a recent bot developer, I have witnessed many people…

The MIT-born machine learning startup, Koko, just got a cash injection to teach chatbots some compassion.

FutureStates is a chatbot designed to let users pose basic policy questions — think, “Do you support the legalization of marijuana?” or “How will you reduce the number of people in U.S. prisons?” — to the four major candidates running for the Oval Office

Advances in messaging and artificial intelligence technology could replace workers in federal call centers.

If people don’t like your bot when it’s you behind the scenes, they definitely won’t like your AI-powered one. Don’t write any code until…

The White House announced today that President Obama will use a Facebook Messenger bot to retrieve correspondence from citizens. People who send messages to the White House Facebook page will now speak with the bot.

Its creator previously took on parking tickets and flight delays.

Charity: Water on Facebook Messenger - The first nonprofit to accept donations through Messenger. (Charity and Giving and Facebook Messenger)

Want analytics for your Kik bot? We now support Kik natively! Brief overview of Dashbot.io support for Kik. SDK documentation at http://www.dashbot.io/sdk/kik Sign up for free at www.dashbot.io

The latest Tweets from Pharmaduke (@pharmaduke3000). bot combining Marmaduke comics + Erowid trip reports at random. posts every three hours. smoke something. by @nah_solo

The latest Tweets from Editing NewYorkTimes (@nyt_diff). Bot that highlights the changes in the news on the main page of @nytimes. By @j_e_d. Based on the idea of @newsdiffs

Sept. 28 & 29, 2016 Fair Market Austin, TX - Two days of bot talks and community building! Bot! zine readers get 25% off the price of admission! Go see talks from bot luminaries like Ted Livingston of Kik, Amir Shevat of Slack, Esther Crawford of Olabot, and many more!

If you’re interested in hosting a panel or talk of your own at the event, there’s still time! Submit your ideas here.

We’ll check our pulse on interest and capability for messaging based conversational solutions combining ChatBot AI & Human service. Is 2016 also the year of Conversational UI in Slovenia/EU as Chris Messina wrote and talked about.

IBM recently released the Watson Conversation service to make the difficult task of automatically understanding and responding the end users as simple as possible. The service provides a nifty GUI for training and configuring intents and dialog flow. From virtual agents to chat bots, see what you can do with new cool Watson Conversation API to automate interactions and take your application to a whole next level. 

Come learn about the upcoming Pebble Core from Pebble's head of engineering, Thomas Sarlandie.
Thomas, grew up in France with a passion for computers and the Internet and was barely an intern dur

Chat bots. They’re hype. You can text them, and through the miracle of NLP, they’ll text you back. But is it really that easy? Yes. It is. Show up to this meetup, and three hours later you w

"Bots are the new apps!"
You've probably have heard some variation of this statement in the past year. Seems that everyone is building bots! You can build and connect intelligent chat b

Bot startups have been 🔥 on Product Hunt this summer. You might not have thought about bots yet, but let me tell you, bots have been thinking about you.