VentureBeat sat down with Phil Libin, managing director at venture capital firm General Catalyst, to get his take on the state of the bot ecosystem. It was just a year ago that the former Evernote CEO joined General Catalyst as a partner. Since then, chatbots and conversational interfaces have roared into the technology mainstream, with hundreds of companies attracting more than $4 billion in funding to make thousands and thousands of bots and conversational UIs for platforms like Messenger, Slack, Alexa, and Allo, to name just a few.

Sam along with the team at Quartz are building solutions to serve the new ways people consume news. Using a text messaging interface, users…

Since then, conversational AI has been the hottest of topics in academia as well as in large tech companies like Facebook or Microsoft (remember Tay? we do too 😁). Right now, we’re at the stage where PhDs have written really good papers, open source implementations have started to emerge and mature, and startups can start building on this body of research to ship new products. Exciting times! 😎

When confronted with AI, somehow all we want to do is break it.

Here come the fashbots, and this time they might actually be useful. Facebook’s seemingly half-baked chatbot platform soured many on the potential of..

… and very good. IBM’s Watson analyzed hundreds of horror movie trailers to figure out what makes an audience jump. Editors don’t need to worry about losing their jobs quite yet: The AI system suggested its ten “favorite” clips and a living, breathing human being edited it all together.

For this installment, I interviewed Ellen Choi, one of the founders of chatbot-powered people management software called CareerLark. I met her and worked with her during the botcamp program at betaworks. This interview is focused more on marketing, sales, and strategy and not on product development.

Choosing which tools to use to build your dream bot becomes a bit daunting in the face of so many amazing options. Do you know how to make a strong selection? What other choices could you have made, if you knew more about the options?

AI powered personal assistants that take notes for you during calls. Get started with yours for free today!

Try it now! Add Evabot to your team’s Slack Channel.
Eva will send a free “Coffee” gift to the person who adds it first!

You wouldn’t use a hammer to dig a hole in the ground and you should not use a bot to do the job of every website and mobile application. Like any tool, bots can be a terrible experience when used for the wrong job, but can be powerful when used for the right use cases and better the experience.

Want to build an awesome natural language understanding bot? Here’s how.

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.)

As our architecture evolves and becomes more complex, it introduces complexity for deployments, debugging and communication amongst developers and their teams. Consequently, scaling development teams has also become complex. ChatOps is here to bridge this gap.

Developers writing bots all face the same problems: bots require basic I/O; they must have language and dialog skills; and they must connect to users – preferably in any conversation experience and language the user chooses. The Microsoft Bot Framework provides tools to easily solve these problems and more for developers e.g., automatic translation to more than 30 languages, user and conversation state management, debugging tools, etc.

Join us at our first bots meetup - Hear from startups, platforms and major brands about their chat and messaging insights. We’re delighted to have the following innovators talking about practical strategies, technologies and how to overcome challenges on the way to conversational success.

Seems a good time to discuss the data we can generate with our bots and the decisions we can make to improve performance, engagement, etc.  We will jump into concepts like users, activity, events, funnels, cohorts, and others.

In this session, we will introduce you to the Alexa Voice Service – Amazon’s cloud based service that handles all the speech recognition, machine learning, and natural language understanding for all Alexa-enabled devices, including Amazon Echo, and gives you the ability to build voice driven apps called skills, that enable customers to interact with devices in a more intuitive way by using voice.

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!