Summary: 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.<br> <br> Links mentioned in this podcast.<br> <br> http://bit.ly/botbusiness101<br> <br> Feel free to comment or reach out directly to Ekim ekim at botego.com<br> <br> You can find the full transcript below.<br> <br> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J11ibWqiTJU<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> 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’.<br> <br> -Hi Ekim, could you please introduce yourself in a couple of sentences for our listeners who don’t know you yet?<br> <br> -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.<br> <br> -Thank you. So, if I understand correctly, you were working during your university years as a call agent.<br> <br> -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.<br> <br> -Did it influence your direction like after the college or was it always on your mind becoming more efficient with technology?<br> <br> -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.<br> <br> -Bots have a big history but didn’t get traction before. Do you think that acquiring Siri was significant for the development of bots?<br> <br> -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,
