The Chatbot Podcast

Many people experience chatbots via Messenger the first time. But Messenger was not the first messaging platform that opened its doors for bot developers. In fact, there are quite a few apps out there enabling us to build amazing bots and reach users on their favorite platform.   For this episode, I invited David Pichsenmeister, the 'botfather'. He is the Co-founder of Oratio and the Organiser of the Chatbot Conf. He is the one to talk about different messaging applications and bots.   We’ll talk about: - Messenger's newest chat plugin - WhatsApp and it's business use cases - What is to know about Viber, Telegram, and Kik and many more... Mentioned in the podcast:Orat.io - helping businesses connect and automate different messaging channels Chatbot Conf - A yearly chatbot Conference by Oratio   You can reach and learn more about David here. Check out David's newest product: https://mailport.io If you are interested in learning more about Chatbots and Messenger Marketing, sign up for my free live training.  

Many people experience chatbots via Messenger the first time. But Messenger was not the first messaging platform that opened its doors for bot developers. In fact, there are quite a few apps out there enabling us to build amazing bots and reach users on their favorite platform. For this episode, I invited David Pichsenmeister, the 'botfather'. He is the Co-founder of Oratio and the Organiser of the Chatbot Conf. He is the one to talk about different messaging applications and bots. We’ll talk about: - Messenger's newest chat plugin - WhatsApp and it's business use cases - What is to know about Viber, Telegram, and Kik and many more... Mentioned in the podcast:Orat.io - helping businesses connect and automate different messaging channels Chatbot Conf - A yearly chatbot Conference by Oratio After Chatbot Conf 2017 with 'botfather' David Pichsenmeister in Vienna You can reach and learn more about David here. Check out David's newest product: http://mailport.io If you are interested in learning more about Chatbots and Messenger Marketing, sign up for my free live training.

Mentioned in the episode: Botcopy CopyRevision Expert Dojo ManyChat realtimeboard.com People Magazine   Also, please find the whole transcript below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0jw3eMMWIc - Welcome everyone, this is Bálint from chatbottutorial.com and today I’m going to interview two persons, two amazing persons who established the company called Botcopy and they are talking about the challenges, the design aspects and the copywriting aspects of creating a good experience for your chatbot. So please guys introduce yourselves in a couple of sentences and welcome to the show. - I’m Rob Lubow, I’m a creative copywriter and a creative director and the co-founder of Botcopy, also a founder of CopyRevision.com. - My name is Dustin Dye and I am a partner in Expert Dojo which is an accelerator for start-up companies, which allowed me to get hands-on with much start-ups and small businesses and introduced me to Swelly, who is a member of Expert Dojo for a while where we started and we are getting hands-on and opened up the door for the bot space, which is why I decided that, you know, writing bots was one of the funniest things that I’ve done within start-ups in Expert Dojo, so I gathered the best writers I know, like Rob and a few others and designers as well and started botcopy.com - Sounds amazing. So you have a great overview over the start-ups and you see how you can help them with a new insight of their copy in the bot space, right? - Yeah, so I’ve been with Expert Dojo since the beginning of the accelerator and we are taking on about a hundred different start-up companies now. And in doing so we go through every stage when everybody comes in and at different stages, so it’s fun but is also allows me to really see interesting use cases for bots, in every bot you can have a different use case, an objective, you know, where when people like Swell, when he first came in to Expert Dojo, you know. I met Peter about a year and a half ago and he came in, he just had an application, and they were kind of introducing us to the bot space and how they were thinking about switching the whole business of the bots. It was really the first time I’ve been introduced to the bot space, so I started doing a lot of research and seeing that that was a good idea, because there we had 30.000 users. In the beginning of their app that has just been launched for 3 or 4 months. I think it was like the Austrian Shark Tank or something like that in the beginning, we were doing some fascinating things, and as an accelerator, you know, just feel like a usual mood to jump ships into the bot space. So as soon as I started doing some research and saw it’s kind of like just this new land of opportunity for start-ups to really take over existing platforms like Facebook where there were, you know, already billions of people using and then you could think that ok, we have this app and you can launch your app in the App Store and you can compete like with most other start-up companies your business is in the App Store and they’re paying, you know on an average 5 to 7 dollars to acquire a user. But we all have in the use, you know, very few applications in our phones. I think on average it’s like 6. And there’s also millions of other apps that are competing within the App Store. So it’s kind of a difficult game. It’s a risky game. Most are at a risk with the failure rate and at least in California alone is 90% failure rate and then to jump on and try to compete with other apps and something like that, it’s difficult. So when I saw that there’s this open opportunity in the bot space, we can leverage these platforms where a ton of users already exists, then it’s actually really cool. So we started working with Swell and not only on ...

Mentioned in the episode: Botcopy CopyRevision Expert Dojo ManyChat realtimeboard.com People Magazine   Also, please find the whole transcript below. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0jw3eMMWIc - Welcome everyone, this is Bálint from chatbottutorial.com and today I’m going to interview two persons, two amazing persons who established the company called Botcopy and they are talking about the challenges, the design aspects and the copywriting aspects of creating a good experience for your chatbot. So please guys introduce yourselves in a couple of sentences and welcome to the show. - I’m Rob Lubow, I’m a creative copywriter and a creative director and the co-founder of Botcopy, also a founder of CopyRevision.com. - My name is Dustin Dye and I am a partner in Expert Dojo which is an accelerator for start-up companies, which allowed me to get hands-on with much start-ups and small businesses and introduced me to Swelly, who is a member of Expert Dojo for a while where we started and we are getting hands-on and opened up the door for the bot space, which is why I decided that, you know, writing bots was one of the funniest things that I’ve done within start-ups in Expert Dojo, so I gathered the best writers I know, like Rob and a few others and designers as well and started botcopy.com - Sounds amazing. So you have a great overview over the start-ups and you see how you can help them with a new insight of their copy in the bot space, right? - Yeah, so I’ve been with Expert Dojo since the beginning of the accelerator and we are taking on about a hundred different start-up companies now. And in doing so we go through every stage when everybody comes in and at different stages, so it’s fun but is also allows me to really see interesting use cases for bots, in every bot you can have a different use case, an objective, you know, where when people like Swell, when he first came in to Expert Dojo, you know. I met Peter about a year and a half ago and he came in, he just had an application, and they were kind of introducing us to the bot space and how they were thinking about switching the whole business of the bots. It was really the first time I’ve been introduced to the bot space, so I started doing a lot of research and seeing that that was a good idea, because there we had 30.000 users. In the beginning of their app that has just been launched for 3 or 4 months. I think it was like the Austrian Shark Tank or something like that in the beginning, we were doing some fascinating things, and as an accelerator, you know, just feel like a usual mood to jump ships into the bot space. So as soon as I started doing some research and saw it’s kind of like just this new land of opportunity for start-ups to really take over existing platforms like Facebook where there were, you know, already billions of people using and then you could think that ok, we have this app and you can launch your app in the App Store and you can compete like with most other start-up companies your business is in the App Store and they’re paying, you know on an average 5 to 7 dollars to acquire a user. But we all have in the use, you know, very few applications in our phones. I think on average it’s like 6. And there’s also millions of other apps that are competing within the App Store. So it’s kind of a difficult game. It’s a risky game. Most are at a risk with the failure rate and at least in California alone is 90% failure rate and then to jump on and try to compete with other apps and something like that, it’s difficult. So when I saw that there’s this open opportunity in the bot space, we can leverage these platforms where a ton of users already exists, then it’s actually really cool. So we started working with Swell and not only on t...

Learn more about Messenger marketing from Mikael Yang. Mentioned in the episode: My ManyChat Review ManyChat MailChimp Zapier Facebook WhatsApp ICQ Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Also, please find the whole transcript below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBO1OBJMR4 Balint Pataki: Thank you and welcome to the podcast. Thank you that you made time again and accepted my invitation. Many of us are familiar with ManyChat and your work in ManyChat but can you just give us a little bit of background where are you coming from, how did you come to bots and the idea of establishing a company in this age. Mikael Yang: Sure. ManyChat is a messenger marketing platform and we help small and medium business to do marketing sales and the support through Facebook Messenger. Right now we power over a hundred thousand businesses in over a hundred countries around the world and we started this in 2015 when Telegram Messenger opened up their API and that was Telegram Messenger for those listeners who don’t know, it’s a messenger that is popular in other countries solves the same problems as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and Telegram opened up their API in July 2015 and we've created a platform for broadcasting messages to your Telegram Bot subscribers because we saw an opportunity to give people an option to communicate one to many through this channel and before that the only thing that people were doing on messenger is basically communicating one on one or in small groups so this concept of broadcasting messages to many people through messenger was still not known to anyone. We've built a platform that made it really easy to do it and grew virally and a year later when Facebook opened up their API we just knew what had to be done on that platform and we've built ManyChat for Facebook Messenger and now we are powering messenger businesses helping them to do marketing through this channel. The only reason to switch over or to add messenger to your marketing mix is because you are getting 10x engagement than through channels like email. Balint Pataki: I think we will talk about the engagement a bit later. What was your first Bot experience? Was it via telegram, these so to say newsletters or grant communication or was that something that made you curious? Mikael Yang: My first Bot experiences were in the times of ICQ and IRC wherein there would be these artificial entities, these bots that would perform some kinds of actions inside of group chat. For example, they could count your karma or they could facilitate an exchange between the groups between the participants inside the group. Also, I remember there was a Bots on the public servers of Warcraft for computing the Defense of the Ancients’ rating. You could ask that Bot what's my raring, what's that person’s rating et cetera. That would be the first encounters of Bots and if we’re talking about specifically Bots on messengers that would be telegram. Balint Pataki: You started with telegram, did you already see that probably you'll drag it along other platforms as well and possibly bigger platforms or you were already excited that telegram is big enough to have a huge opportunity in this space. Mikael Yang: I think both things are correct. We saw how all the platforms would eventually need to open up their APIs because if you want businesses to be on your platform you got to give them tools to communicate with their customers and the fastest way to do that is to open up the APIs and give the third party developers an ability to create those tools for the businesses and to market and sell those. But still, we were already excited about telegram itself because the platform had over at that point was 60 70 million users. Right now it’s over 100 million users and it was already...

Learn more about Messenger marketing from Mikael Yang. Mentioned in the episode: My ManyChat Review ManyChat MailChimp Zapier Facebook WhatsApp ICQ Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Also, please find the whole transcript below. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBO1OBJMR4 Balint Pataki: Thank you and welcome to the podcast. Thank you that you made time again and accepted my invitation. Many of us are familiar with ManyChat and your work in ManyChat but can you just give us a little bit of background where are you coming from, how did you come to bots and the idea of establishing a company in this age. Mikael Yang: Sure. ManyChat is a messenger marketing platform and we help small and medium business to do marketing sales and the support through Facebook Messenger. Right now we power over a hundred thousand businesses in over a hundred countries around the world and we started this in 2015 when Telegram Messenger opened up their API and that was Telegram Messenger for those listeners who don’t know, it’s a messenger that is popular in other countries solves the same problems as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and Telegram opened up their API in July 2015 and we've created a platform for broadcasting messages to your Telegram Bot subscribers because we saw an opportunity to give people an option to communicate one to many through this channel and before that the only thing that people were doing on messenger is basically communicating one on one or in small groups so this concept of broadcasting messages to many people through messenger was still not known to anyone. We've built a platform that made it really easy to do it and grew virally and a year later when Facebook opened up their API we just knew what had to be done on that platform and we've built ManyChat for Facebook Messenger and now we are powering messenger businesses helping them to do marketing through this channel. The only reason to switch over or to add messenger to your marketing mix is because you are getting 10x engagement than through channels like email. Balint Pataki: I think we will talk about the engagement a bit later. What was your first Bot experience? Was it via telegram, these so to say newsletters or grant communication or was that something that made you curious? Mikael Yang: My first Bot experiences were in the times of ICQ and IRC wherein there would be these artificial entities, these bots that would perform some kinds of actions inside of group chat. For example, they could count your karma or they could facilitate an exchange between the groups between the participants inside the group. Also, I remember there was a Bots on the public servers of Warcraft for computing the Defense of the Ancients’ rating. You could ask that Bot what's my raring, what's that person’s rating et cetera. That would be the first encounters of Bots and if we’re talking about specifically Bots on messengers that would be telegram. Balint Pataki: You started with telegram, did you already see that probably you'll drag it along other platforms as well and possibly bigger platforms or you were already excited that telegram is big enough to have a huge opportunity in this space. Mikael Yang: I think both things are correct. We saw how all the platforms would eventually need to open up their APIs because if you want businesses to be on your platform you got to give them tools to communicate with their customers and the fastest way to do that is to open up the APIs and give the third party developers an ability to create those tools for the businesses and to market and sell those. But still, we were already excited about telegram itself because the platform had over at that point was 60 70 million users. Right now it’s over 100 million users and it was already ...

Learn more about data for your chatbot from Ilker Koksal Mentioned in the podcast: botanalytics.co Bankingworld.co Facebook Skype Zendesk LivePerson Also, please find the whole transcript below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0MacwKm5n0 - Hi guys, it’s Bálint from chatbottutorial.com. Today, I have a guest with me - Ilker Koksal. Welcome to our podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself in a couple of sentences? - Thank yo!. I’m Ilker, CEO and co-founder of Botanalytics, which is a conversational analytics and engagement tool for chatbots, based in San Francisco. We support more than ten messaging platforms, like Facebook Messenger, Slack, Line, Telegram, Kik, WeChat, Twilio, Viber and many more. Chatbot makers analyze their chatbots and find their bottleneck points or set up bottles?  To observe their conversation flow many more things they can do at Botanalytics. We are supporting it, we are a team of about ten. - Amazing. I assume you didn’t start with a team of ten and who … this globally. (1m17s). Tell me about your start. What was your first bot experience? - We have two co-founders in SF and on those hackathons (1m32s), we built chatbots. At some point, we realized that conversational analytics is very different than mobile and web analytics, and in those months we dived deep into conversational analytics and pain points, and then we opened Botanalytics. - And when was that? - About one and half years ago. Then we backed like 500 start-ups, and we got some couple angels and 500 start-ups and a couple VCs …  And then we were growing fast ourselves. - I can imagine. This was before Facebook opened its platform. Did you know that when you…  the company? - Yeah, I had a medium blog post before the Facebook announcement last year that you can take a look at. I said that Facebook would announce this kind of thing and that the bots would simplify our daily routines in this kind of way. - What was the turning point for you when you said “Okay, this bot thing is going to be huge and I need to establish a company?” - Actually, we had an analytics soon and opened up a tiny brand for chatbots, and we got great traction on chatbot and …  to the Botanalytics, because we see huge potential here and we are bot makers, because we build a lot of chatbots and hackathons and we got prices for those chatbots, so we know what we need as a bot maker. And because of that, we really solve the problem and we …tutor the company in all conversational analytics. - Ok. If I recall correctly, you have thousands of bots in your system. How many bot makers trust you? - Yeah, more than thousands of bots are using Botanalytics, and we have Messenger bots, Slack, Kik, Line, Telegram, Twilio, Viber and some generate SMS bots as well. Recently, I published a chatbot market over BU,  because we stored thousands of bots and their data and I published like general retention rate, functionality use, which use, and … and onboarding experience of bots, I published this kind of report. People can look at it on VentureBeat And because we stored like educational bots, banking bots, travel bots, shopping bots, any kind of bots we are storing. - So, you have many unique cases and see the numbers. I don’t need the exact numbers, but can you please tell us roughly - like I guess Messenger is dominating - but by how much? … - Yes, 40 or 45% of our bots are coming from Facebook Messenger, kind of dominating our system, but there is a big potential in SMS bots as well. I think customer support agent bots will dominate this year, but Messenger as a built spot  in there and we have great studies f...

Learn more about data for your chatbot from Ilker Koksal Mentioned in the podcast: botanalytics.co Bankingworld.co Facebook Skype Zendesk LivePerson Also, please find the whole transcript below. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0MacwKm5n0 - Hi guys, it’s Bálint from chatbottutorial.com. Today, I have a guest with me - Ilker Koksal. Welcome to our podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself in a couple of sentences? - Thank yo!. I’m Ilker, CEO and co-founder of Botanalytics, which is a conversational analytics and engagement tool for chatbots, based in San Francisco. We support more than ten messaging platforms, like Facebook Messenger, Slack, Line, Telegram, Kik, WeChat, Twilio, Viber and many more. Chatbot makers analyze their chatbots and find their bottleneck points or set up bottles?  To observe their conversation flow many more things they can do at Botanalytics. We are supporting it, we are a team of about ten. - Amazing. I assume you didn’t start with a team of ten and who … this globally. (1m17s). Tell me about your start. What was your first bot experience? - We have two co-founders in SF and on those hackathons (1m32s), we built chatbots. At some point, we realized that conversational analytics is very different than mobile and web analytics, and in those months we dived deep into conversational analytics and pain points, and then we opened Botanalytics. - And when was that? - About one and half years ago. Then we backed like 500 start-ups, and we got some couple angels and 500 start-ups and a couple VCs …  And then we were growing fast ourselves. - I can imagine. This was before Facebook opened its platform. Did you know that when you…  the company? - Yeah, I had a medium blog post before the Facebook announcement last year that you can take a look at. I said that Facebook would announce this kind of thing and that the bots would simplify our daily routines in this kind of way. - What was the turning point for you when you said “Okay, this bot thing is going to be huge and I need to establish a company?” - Actually, we had an analytics soon and opened up a tiny brand for chatbots, and we got great traction on chatbot and …  to the Botanalytics, because we see huge potential here and we are bot makers, because we build a lot of chatbots and hackathons and we got prices for those chatbots, so we know what we need as a bot maker. And because of that, we really solve the problem and we …tutor the company in all conversational analytics. - Ok. If I recall correctly, you have thousands of bots in your system. How many bot makers trust you? - Yeah, more than thousands of bots are using Botanalytics, and we have Messenger bots, Slack, Kik, Line, Telegram, Twilio, Viber and some generate SMS bots as well. Recently, I published a chatbot market over BU,  because we stored thousands of bots and their data and I published like general retention rate, functionality use, which use, and … and onboarding experience of bots, I published this kind of report. People can look at it on VentureBeat And because we stored like educational bots, banking bots, travel bots, shopping bots, any kind of bots we are storing. - So, you have many unique cases and see the numbers. I don’t need the exact numbers, but can you please tell us roughly - like I guess Messenger is dominating - but by how much? … - Yes, 40 or 45% of our bots are coming from Facebook Messenger, kind of dominating our system, but there is a big potential in SMS bots as well. I think customer support agent bots will dominate this year, but Messenger as a built spot  in there and we have great studies fr...

Learn more about ways to find bots from Botlist co-founder Seth Louey. Mentioned in the episode: Botlist.co Golden State Warriors bot Product Hunt seth at botlist.co Also, please find the whole transcript below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMKedA1DzDw   Hi everyone, it’s Balint from chatbottutorial.com and today I have a guest with me. He’s Seth Louey, he is the founder of the BotList.co and today we're going to talk about his experience with chatbots about BotList and in general about the design of bots. -Hi Seth, could you please introduce yourself in a couple of sentences for the people who don’t know you yet? -Sure. Hey I’m Seth Louey here, I am the co-founder of BotList. We basically are an app store for bots or I would like to say we try to connect humans to bots. We have been alive for about a year now, well a little over a year and we’ve seen some amazing things in the bot ecosystem and I'd like to think that we’re one of the best discovery platforms out there for bots. -Ok, awesome, thank you. I know you designed websites before. Did it ever occur to you that the websites should be more interactive and not the way they are? -Oh yeah. I could see this coming from many years away, actually when I first jumped on slack back in the day, I think it was like 3 or 4 years ago, we actually coded our own bot in slack and it was just something very fun to do, it was named Claptrap and it was just, you know, you could interact with it every day and it would just be a fun little tool to take away from, you know, work and it would be nice little break so we could definitely see in our action coming from a long way away, so yeah. It's an incredible time to be in the space. -Was there a need for you that you wanted to be more interactive with these forms or you just heard about it from somewhere? -You know, I think the thing is like everyday everybody is so busy and you know if we can make things easier with automation it would give you more time to do the things that you really want to do in life. You could definitely see the need for it, especially with multiple social media channels and multiple tasks, everyday everybody needs to work harder and faster but we don't really spend much time enjoying the everyday things, so when you automate some of your trivial tasks, it's better for you, you now, to spend a lot of time in life doing the things that you really want to do. -Yeah, that’s true, like the power of integration, so you can just see the IFTTT and … -Zapier. -Exactly, exactly. So, what was your first bot experience? - Well, before we launched BotList, we definitely tested a bunch of bots when they were first coming out, but before that I think the very first bot experience was the one when we built in our like internal communications and it was purely just for entertainment but I’d say, you know, the best integrations are the automated tasks like I said. I think IFTTT I wouldn’t necessarily call it a conversational bot, but I mean technically it is a bot when it automates a lot of stuff for you. So I would say very, very early on stages IFTTT was the first bot experience even though it wasn't really a conversational piece. So if you look at it in that sense, definitely IFTTT, but as for like a conversational UI,  I think the posturing was probably one of the most memorable experiences, interacting with some of their, I think it was like Humanie (?) was their bot; that was probably one of the best experiences and one of those well factors of like ‘holy crap this, you know, conversational bot actually can just sit there and have a conversation with me’ and it's not real human so I think that was very exciting and the most memorable.

Learn more about ways to find bots from Botlist co-founder Seth Louey. Mentioned in the episode: Botlist.co Golden State Warriors bot Product Hunt seth at botlist.co Also, please find the whole transcript below. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMKedA1DzDw   Hi everyone, it’s Balint from chatbottutorial.com and today I have a guest with me. He’s Seth Louey, he is the founder of the BotList.co and today we're going to talk about his experience with chatbots about BotList and in general about the design of bots. -Hi Seth, could you please introduce yourself in a couple of sentences for the people who don’t know you yet? -Sure. Hey I’m Seth Louey here, I am the co-founder of BotList. We basically are an app store for bots or I would like to say we try to connect humans to bots. We have been alive for about a year now, well a little over a year and we’ve seen some amazing things in the bot ecosystem and I'd like to think that we’re one of the best discovery platforms out there for bots. -Ok, awesome, thank you. I know you designed websites before. Did it ever occur to you that the websites should be more interactive and not the way they are? -Oh yeah. I could see this coming from many years away, actually when I first jumped on slack back in the day, I think it was like 3 or 4 years ago, we actually coded our own bot in slack and it was just something very fun to do, it was named Claptrap and it was just, you know, you could interact with it every day and it would just be a fun little tool to take away from, you know, work and it would be nice little break so we could definitely see in our action coming from a long way away, so yeah. It's an incredible time to be in the space. -Was there a need for you that you wanted to be more interactive with these forms or you just heard about it from somewhere? -You know, I think the thing is like everyday everybody is so busy and you know if we can make things easier with automation it would give you more time to do the things that you really want to do in life. You could definitely see the need for it, especially with multiple social media channels and multiple tasks, everyday everybody needs to work harder and faster but we don't really spend much time enjoying the everyday things, so when you automate some of your trivial tasks, it's better for you, you now, to spend a lot of time in life doing the things that you really want to do. -Yeah, that’s true, like the power of integration, so you can just see the IFTTT and … -Zapier. -Exactly, exactly. So, what was your first bot experience? - Well, before we launched BotList, we definitely tested a bunch of bots when they were first coming out, but before that I think the very first bot experience was the one when we built in our like internal communications and it was purely just for entertainment but I’d say, you know, the best integrations are the automated tasks like I said. I think IFTTT I wouldn’t necessarily call it a conversational bot, but I mean technically it is a bot when it automates a lot of stuff for you. So I would say very, very early on stages IFTTT was the first bot experience even though it wasn't really a conversational piece. So if you look at it in that sense, definitely IFTTT, but as for like a conversational UI,  I think the posturing was probably one of the most memorable experiences, interacting with some of their, I think it was like Humanie (?) was their bot; that was probably one of the best experiences and one of those well factors of like ‘holy crap this, you know, conversational bot actually can just sit there and have a conversation with me’ and it's not real human so I think that was very exciting and the most memorable.

Ekim Kaya is the founder of Botego, a client business in the bot spaces since 2007. He is sharing his experiences with us today. Listen to this interview to learn more about the industry. Links mentioned in this podcast. https://bit.ly/botbusiness101 Feel free to comment or reach out directly to Ekim ekim at botego.com You can find the full transcript below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J11ibWqiTJU       Hey guys, it’s Bálint from https://chatbottutorial.com and today I have a guest with me. He’s Ekim and he’s the writer of the successful book on bots entitled ‘Bot Business 101’. -Hi Ekim, could you please introduce yourself in a couple of sentences for our listeners who don’t know you yet? -Sure. My name is Ekim and I’m the founder of a bot company. I founded Botego in 2007, I’m an engineer by education and an entrepreneur by heart and it’s been 10 years now, so we started before Apple acquired Siri. I was following the team of Siri back then. When I was studying engineering in Istanbul Technical University, I used to work as a call centre agent and that’s when it hit me that there’s something wrong with customer service, because people keep calling you and ask the same questions over and over. There’s huge room for improvement in terms of efficiency because it’s costly, time consuming, annoying, not for the customers, but also for the agents and the business, so it’s not a sustainable operation for any business. And that’s why, you know, all American enterprises switch to India or other Eastern countries to provide customer service but then their customers didn’t really like it, they had to switch back to America, all the costs associated with the operation is a problem again. The game has changed right after the Facebook invested around this time last year and I’m just now enjoying the fact that I’ve been waiting for this for 10 years now. -Thank you. So, if I understand correctly, you were working during your university years as a call agent. -Right. It was just for a short time, no one wants to have a career as a call centre agent, that’s why there was a huge turnover but that’s when I realised that we can fix this with software. -Did it influence your direction like after the college or was it always on your mind becoming more efficient with technology? -Yes, I’m always interested in fixing things in terms of making them more efficient, not necessarily physical, because I never worked as an engineer but when you see that you can build a machine, a software, a system that can work by itself, it’s really satisfactory, it’s really fulfilling for me. The fact that things work for me as I sleep: bots, the software, gives me satisfaction and I always try to find shortcuts and increase efficiency wherever I can. -Bots have a big history but didn’t get traction before. Do you think that acquiring Siri was significant for the development of bots? -Well, when you look back, you can now consider it as an important milestone but it’s been so long time and Siri itself didn’t really take off for a long time. So I’m not sure that it really changed things Facebook having a stronger connection with the brands and it had more influence over developments of the bot ecosystem. Because, if you remember, TechCrunch somehow found out that Facebook will be announcing a bot platform on their F8 Developer Conference last year and they somehow got this information and leaked it. Right before the conference I remember Microsoft and others, maybe Line as well, they announced their bot platforms so it was kind of a rushed launch. I remember, we checked up their APIs and they were really simple, because I think they just put together something in a couple of days,...

Ekim Kaya is the founder of Botego, a client business in the bot spaces since 2007. He is sharing his experiences with us today. Listen to this interview to learn more about the industry. Links mentioned in this podcast. http://bit.ly/botbusiness101 Feel free to comment or reach out directly to Ekim ekim at botego.com You can find the full transcript below. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J11ibWqiTJU       Hey guys, it’s Bálint from http://chatbottutorial.com and today I have a guest with me. He’s Ekim and he’s the writer of the successful book on bots entitled ‘Bot Business 101’. -Hi Ekim, could you please introduce yourself in a couple of sentences for our listeners who don’t know you yet? -Sure. My name is Ekim and I’m the founder of a bot company. I founded Botego in 2007, I’m an engineer by education and an entrepreneur by heart and it’s been 10 years now, so we started before Apple acquired Siri. I was following the team of Siri back then. When I was studying engineering in Istanbul Technical University, I used to work as a call centre agent and that’s when it hit me that there’s something wrong with customer service, because people keep calling you and ask the same questions over and over. There’s huge room for improvement in terms of efficiency because it’s costly, time consuming, annoying, not for the customers, but also for the agents and the business, so it’s not a sustainable operation for any business. And that’s why, you know, all American enterprises switch to India or other Eastern countries to provide customer service but then their customers didn’t really like it, they had to switch back to America, all the costs associated with the operation is a problem again. The game has changed right after the Facebook invested around this time last year and I’m just now enjoying the fact that I’ve been waiting for this for 10 years now. -Thank you. So, if I understand correctly, you were working during your university years as a call agent. -Right. It was just for a short time, no one wants to have a career as a call centre agent, that’s why there was a huge turnover but that’s when I realised that we can fix this with software. -Did it influence your direction like after the college or was it always on your mind becoming more efficient with technology? -Yes, I’m always interested in fixing things in terms of making them more efficient, not necessarily physical, because I never worked as an engineer but when you see that you can build a machine, a software, a system that can work by itself, it’s really satisfactory, it’s really fulfilling for me. The fact that things work for me as I sleep: bots, the software, gives me satisfaction and I always try to find shortcuts and increase efficiency wherever I can. -Bots have a big history but didn’t get traction before. Do you think that acquiring Siri was significant for the development of bots? -Well, when you look back, you can now consider it as an important milestone but it’s been so long time and Siri itself didn’t really take off for a long time. So I’m not sure that it really changed things Facebook having a stronger connection with the brands and it had more influence over developments of the bot ecosystem. Because, if you remember, TechCrunch somehow found out that Facebook will be announcing a bot platform on their F8 Developer Conference last year and they somehow got this information and leaked it. Right before the conference I remember Microsoft and others, maybe Line as well, they announced their bot platforms so it was kind of a rushed launch. I remember, we checked up their APIs and they were really simple, because I think they just put together something in a couple of days,

This is a short introductory episode to The Chatbot Podcast. I talk about my background and what the podcast is about.

This is a short introductory episode to The Chatbot Podcast. I talk about my background and what the podcast is about.