Author: Franz Malten Buemann

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It’s hard for SMEs to compete with big tech companies with limited resources nowadays. Whenever you build an app, you need to craft the web version, an Android app, and an iOS equivalent. You probably need a UX designer and a few developers with different skillsets to work on the different platforms. It’s slow and expensive.

And worst of all, your app is doomed from the beginning. People now already have hundreds of apps installed on their mobile phones. And human brains can only remember the last 7 apps they used. Your app will probably be hidden in some folders and be forgotten forever if not uninstalled.

That’s why we created a chatbot to replace the traditional app. And it solves a few problems all at once.

One app rules them all

A chatbot is basically an app that you can interact with the commonly used chat interface. It does not exist in itself, instead, you can use it on your website or in a chat app like Whatsapp, Facebook Messanger, Teams, Slack, Line, etc. So you don’t need to build different apps for different devices.

Once you build your bot for Whatsapp, users can use it wherever they can use Whatsapp. You don’t need to worry about OS or browser compatibility. And the best part, users don’t need to install anything. Just add your phone number to their WhatsApp, they can start using your bot. (For other applications like MS Teams, they may need to search for your bot in the Teams market place and “install” it.)

And just like fashion, UI design changes all the time, but what doesn’t change is the way people chat. When you type something, you expect some message response, it’s simple as that, and it won’t change dramatically in the coming years.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Case Study: Building Appointment Booking Chatbot

2. IBM Watson Assistant provides better intent classification than other commercial products according to published study

3. Testing Conversational AI

4. How intelligent and automated conversational systems are driving B2C revenue and growth.

Better user experience

Form-based user inputs haven’t changed for many years. For people old enough like me, we use to fill in a lot of forms on paper. Nowadays all things are online, but it’s still form-based. Nothing much has changed about that. Even when employees tried to apply for leave, you present them a form, ask them which “Leave Type” they want to apply, and whats are the “Start Time” and “End Time”

What users really want to do is simply “apply ABC leave on XYZ date”. A form is unnecessarily complicated. A simple text message can get the job done in a simple and natural way.

Another problem with the traditional UI design is navigation. You have a lot of features in your app, but you can’t put all of them on your home screen. So we need to create secondary menus to hide them. No matter how well you design your secondary menus, some features will be buried deeply and very difficult to find.

With a chatbot, you don’t need to remember where the buttons are or which menu it’s hidden. Every feature is just one message away. (Of course, your users need to know the feature exists in the first place).

Connect with your users

Emails are dead. My personal email is full of marketing materials and useless information that cleaning up mailbox is becoming a daily chore. Yes, I already set up countless filters to block 99% of them.

And good luck with your in-app push notifications, most of the time people will just clear the unimportant notification as soon as they can and if you are too aggressive, they will uninstall the app altogether.

Residing inside their favorite chat app has the advantage to be really seen by the users. It’s like in the old days, when you really like a girl, you will go and ask “Can I have your phone number”, so when you send her a message, she will probably really read it. Nobody will ask about an email address, but yet that’s what most companies are doing.

This messaging nature also makes a lot of company workflows easier. When there’s something pending your approval, you don’t need to open a separate web page, just send your response in the chatbot. And the counterpart will receive a message in real-time as well.

I’ve built a chatbot to replace/supplement our Employee Self Service web app which our users use to manage our leave and payslips records online. The use case is fairly simple and it fits into the bots perfectly. It can handle common scenarios like

• Apply ABC Leave on XYZ date
• What’s my leave balance now?
• Show my leave history
• Who is on leave on XYZ date/Is ABC on leave on XYZ date?
• Send my payslip in XYZ month
• Approve/Decline employee’s leave

I started this bot as a part-time pet project, and it grows into a fully-featured bot in around 2 months time. The development time is significantly shorter than building mobile apps, yet all the main features are achieved. In fact, some features are actually better than traditional apps, for example, workflow actions are easily integrated into the message, and you can send a voice message if you are too lazy to type.

Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, but it could be a good alternative in future app development.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Why Chatbots could be the next big thing for SMEs was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How to build Alexa Skills without
coding knowledge (2021)

When talking about Alexa Skills building, the common things that come to someone’s mind is AI, programming language, complicated coding, and so on.

You may also think that projecting and executing the creation process is very complicated too.

For most of the process, all of the difficulties mentioned above remain true. We state “for most of the process” since nowadays, it has become easy to build your own Alexa Skill, where all is needed is the idea of what you want it to be for.

Now, it is much easier to create them since the No Code trend has influenced how Amazon manages the Skill creation process.

How Amazon Alexa and Skill building started

It started in November 2014, when Amazon launched its series of Amazon Echo devices, which were Alexa-enabled smart speakers.

They weren’t Alexa themselves, but they were the best channel of receiving the voice request, sending it to Amazon Servers where the hard processing work is made, and obtaining the answer or action requested.

It started with nearly 100 abilities Alexa was capable of doing, even though it now has more than 120.000 Skills available.

This all was made possible in mid-2015 when Amazon released a dedicated platform that would allow every interested developer to create Alexa Skills: the Alexa Skills Kit.

How Amazon made it possible for everyone to build Alexa Skills

Since the developers weren’t the only ones with the desire to build Alexa Skills, use and publish them, Amazon came with a bright solution in 2018.

That solution was Alexa Skill Blueprints. A way for non-developers to build simple Alexa Skills and use them. They even prepared an entire series of tutorials on how to use them.

In their effort to gather more developers and work for creating more Alexa Skills, Amazon made it easier through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) console and Alexa Developer Portal.

This would take the Skill-building process to arise, especially with Amazon supporting the developers and those interested in improving the voice technology. It was the Alexa Fund: dedicated to those with the intention of working in new voice technologies.
There are also the Alexa Developer Rewards and Alexa developer promotions to encourage the developers committed to adding and improving the Skills available in the Alexa Skill Store. Great support would be AWS promotional credits, which would reduce the cost of AWS resources used by the developers while building Alexa Skills.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Case Study: Building Appointment Booking Chatbot

2. IBM Watson Assistant provides better intent classification than other commercial products according to published study

3. Testing Conversational AI

4. How intelligent and automated conversational systems are driving B2C revenue and growth.

How to build your Alexa Skill without coding or technical knowledge

With everyone, be it an individual or a business, looking to create an Alexa Skill, new opportunities are arising. Every developer or developing platform is trying to simplify every step of the Skill Building process.

The number of people aiming to create an Alexa Skill is increasing. Not only to become a professional Alexa Skill developer but also for personal use. Be it as a hobby or for their businesses.

While for individual users the process of Skill building is simple, for the business ones is more complicated.

This is where a third party Developing Platform comes in to help.

With a simple interface, you can implement all the parts needed to complete the Skill and make it ready for publishing.

Not only that but also modify the content of the Skill if needed and also, test it, publish it and check how your Skill performs when made available in the Alexa Skill Store.

All of this is available and free to access on Ipervox.

Why is Ipervox the right choice to build your Alexa Skill?

In case you’re a complete beginner and need more information about what are Alexa Skills and how to create one, you can start by using the Ipervox platform.

Viewing the tutorials made available from our team or checking our FAQ site will make everything understandable.

This development platform has a simple and user-friendly interface, which allows every user to effortlessly build the Skill they want and how they want it to be.

With a well guided interface and a structure oriented in detailed Skill Building, Ipervox allows you to manage and easily control every step.

It helps reach the desired product at the end, giving shape to the initial idea that inspired you to create the Alexa Skill.

Above we mentioned Alexa as a tool for businesses. Ipervox has created several tools and guides to assist every business and entrepreneur in building their own Alexa Skill.

This will help you reach your audience and customers with the most straightforward tool there is: the Voice.

Voice technologies are emerging as the best and promising tool of the future. Not only to reach but also to engage with all of your clients.

Embracing it now means you will have a safe spot in the future. A future where Voice Apps become a common thing for businesses to use.

Create your Alexa Skill using the Ipervox online platform with the set of instruments made available from us. It will help you improve the interaction with your audience, gain their attention and their hearts.

If you want to create your Alexa Skill right now, all you need to do is click “Start for Free”, and you can start building a new channel. A channel that will connect you with your new audience.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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How to build Alexa Skills without
coding knowledge was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Getting started with the Relay SDK

Hey folks! Let’s get started with a quick example showing how you can use the Relay node.js SDK to create a simple number game. For this example, we’ll use Heroku to host a Websocket that will maintain a connection with the Relay Server.

First, create a new app using Heroku. We’ll be naming ours ‘relay-wf’:

Next, let’s setup our environment with git and Heroku CLI (instructions for windows/linux):

$ brew tap heroku/brew && brew install heroku
$ heroku login

Next, let’s initialize our environment:

$ cd relay-wf
$ git init
$ npm init
$ npm install relay-js

Next, we’ll setup our example interaction & deploy it to heroku. Here we are creating a basic app that let’s users guess two numbers and returns the one who guest closest

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Case Study: Building Appointment Booking Chatbot

2. IBM Watson Assistant provides better intent classification than other commercial products according to published study

3. Testing Conversational AI

4. How intelligent and automated conversational systems are driving B2C revenue and growth.

# workflow.js

import relay from 'relay-js'

const app = relay()

app.workflow(`numbers`, workflow => {
  relay.on(`start`, async () => {
    const user = await relay.getDeviceName()
    const random = Math.floor(Math.random() * 10) + 1
    await relay.say(`Player One, pick a number between 1 and 10`)
    const numberOne = await relay.listen(["$DIGIT_SEQUENCE"])
    await relay.say(`Player Two, pick a number between 1 and 10`)
    const numberTwo = await relay.listen(["$DIGIT_SEQUENCE"])
    if (Math.abs(numberOne - random) < Math.abs(numberTwo - random)) { 
      await relay.say(`Player One wins! ${numberOne} was closest to ${random}!`)
    } else { 
      await relay.say(`Player Two wins! ${numberTwo} was closest to ${random}!`)
    }
    await relay.terminate()
  })
})

Next, we’ll add our workflow configuration to Relay servers. First, fire up Dash by going to api-dash.relaygo.com (for production, this is dash.relaygo.com) and navigate to the Workflows section and select the Create button for ‘Custom Workflow’ :

From there, you can enter your workflow configuration. This includes the name of your workflow (here we’ve named ours ‘numbers’), the devices you’d like it on (we’ll push to just one device here, ‘Ibraheem’) and URI hosting the workflow (relay-wf.herokuapp.com). We’re also using the spoken phrase ‘pick a number’ to initiate our workflow from the device.

Save your workflow and then let’s deploy our workflow node.js app to heroku:

$ git commit -am 'Initial deploy'
$ export HEROKU_APP=relay-wf
$ git push master heroku
$ heroku logs --tail

And that’s it! If everything worked, you should now be able to speak ‘pick a number’ into the Relay assistant and trigger your number game!

Ready to start developing with Relay? Click here to signup for our Relay SDK beta.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Getting started with the Relay SDK — node.js edition was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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No matter whether you are surfing online as a business user or a consumer, you’ll most likely run across customer-friendly AI-driven bots that support smooth communication. Here, in this article we’ll have a closer look at some intriguing points you may find useful. Although some concepts need more profound consideration, the article will be a good piece to start with.
This said, the key notions that open up the Chatbots topic are the following:

What are the chatbots?

Are chatbots still popular in 2021?

How can chatbots help business, namely real estate?

With these ideas in mind, let’s get started.

What technologies underlie chatbots: AI, NLG, ML

Chatbots can be defined as software programs built to ensure meaningful interaction between human users and computers via messaging, texts, live voice or video conversation. Interestingly, GoodFirms Chatbot Usage survey revealed that nearly 95% of respondents from the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, and other countries have used chatbots at least once in the past 12 month.

Chatbots, being one of the tech megatrends for 2021, are powered by the strengths of Artificial Intelligence. AI technology allows bots to understand human-aided communication and provide users with relevant responses based on vast knowledge databases.

When some human-initiated speech or textual data is input, it further involves the processing of data driven by Machine Learning and Deep Learning. ML and DL algorithms help analyze the input information.
The next big tech that helps chatbots be effective communication tools is Natural Language Generation or NLG. This one is for making computer-processed responses sound more humanlike to users while they are interacting with chatbots.
Finally, it is Predictive Analytics that provides the in-depth analysis of massive historical data assets to gain insights for building proactive communication models. Based on customer behavioral patterns generated with PA, chatbots can provide a much wider range of options for interaction.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Case Study: Building Appointment Booking Chatbot

2. IBM Watson Assistant provides better intent classification than other commercial products according to published study

3.Testing Conversational AI

4. How intelligent and automated conversational systems are driving B2C revenue and growth.

Chatbots in 2021: What’s in their popularity?

Does investing in chatbots make any sense in 2021? Surely, does. The explanation is pure and simple, as the current and predicted numbers speak for themselves.

Market experts are sure that chatbots will handle up to 90% of user queries by 2022. The widespread chatbot adoption is projected to help businesses reduce their operational costs by over $8 billion annually.
At the same time, findings from a new report by Juniper Research show that consumer retail spend via chatbots will be around $142 billion by 2024. Compared to 2019, this shows great 400% YoY revenue growth.
There is no doubt, these facts prove the promising horizon for chatbot adoption across industries.

What industries can benefit from chatbots?

Used mainly for service industries, now chatbots can streamline communication with customers for nearly every B2C or B2B sector. Providing multiple website visitors or app users with quick and reasonable answers, chatbots is one of Gartner’s top tech trends aimed to add much value to the improvement of customer experience (CX).

The potential of use cases for utilizing chatbots are truly immense. From Finance to Healthcare to Education and Real Estate, companies leverage chatbots to attract and engage customers with their brand. Here’s a top 5 list of industries that supercharge the customer activities with smart AI-drive bots.

Chatbot Implementation: Are there any sticking points?

The proliferation of virtual assistants for business, however, can be restricted due to the lack of practical knowledge of how to implement chatbot technology. According to Accenture, this is the main reason that stops businesses from introducing chatbots across their customer touchpoints.
With surefire benefits for business, the idea behind chatbot implementation is quite clear — some professional assistance is badly needed to build and integrate conversational bots for your organization. Here’s what we at Adimen usually do for our clients.

What are the benefits of chatbots for real estate?

The pandemic has drastically changed the global consumer market. These changes drive customers to go digital and choose other channels while looking for the products and services they need.

It makes companies rethink and reshape their business strategies to meet and exceed the ever-growing customer needs. This is where chatbots jump into action. Here’s which benefits customers expect while using the chatbots on your website or mobile app, according to the chatbot usage report takeaways.

What’s there for enterprises you may wonder? Truth be told, real estate is a great example of how to harness the power of chatbots in business.
While going to buy or rent a decent house, lots of people just don’t have enough time to look through all the variants available in the property market. What’s more, real estate agents and managers usually have way too many questions from customers to answer, and concerns to alloy. On top of this, increasing the support service staff means additional expenses for your business that seem quite unwelcome in the pandemic times.

Our experience in building chatbots for US real estate agencies let us break down five key benefits that they get after bot integration. The chatbots developed are mostly for client support purposes. As recent facts show, however, the following advantages can be also achieved for marketing and sales departments, payments, server offerings, and suchlike.

Automation of open-source customer data.

Data collection with chatbots is a great asset for any real estate business. The bots gather customer non-personal data for further analytics of user buying intents. It also helps get well-trained ML models for returning more accurate search results for website visitors or smartphone users.

Automation of open-source customer data

Data collection with chatbots is a great asset for any real estate business. The bots gather customer non-personal data for further analytics of user buying intents. It also helps get well-trained ML models for returning more accurate search results for website visitors or smartphone users.

Round-the-clock customer assistance

To err is human, especially when it comes to 24/7 client support services. Today, customer demands are evolving. So, they won’t wait for years for their inquiry any longer. Here chatbots ensure greater services than any human ever can.

Lower operational costs

Trimming business costs by minimizing the number of your real estate agents and chat operators is surely what every business is looking for in 2021. Your chatbots require neither annual bonuses nor sick leaves. Cost-efficiency is what gives a competitive edge for your business.

Self-service tools provision

Next-gen customers are tech-savvy and no more look for time-consuming support service driven by human operators. With chatbots on board, your website or app enables users to personally search for and get any information on property objects they want to buy or rent.

Customer engagement and retention.

Great customer experience is all about personalization. Personal virtual assistants help make the customer buying journey be much more effective. Once lots of customer search and behavioral data is analyzed, you can win the loyalty of your customers via more targeted offerings and tailored brand promotions.

All in all, chatbots in 2021 are a highly effective tool for businesses in terms of cost and resource optimization, lead generation, customer engagement, and a greater omnichannel strategy.

Here at Adimen, we are downright ready for robust collaboration to help you make time- and cost-effective chatbots for your real estate business. Have you got another business, say, in fintech? No problem, we’ll have you covered on that as well!

Just drop us a line, and we’ll do the rest.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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5 Reasons to Leverage Chatbots for Real Estate in 2021 was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m learning all the time — conversation-driven development in a chatbot for Erasmus students with Rasa framework

I am sure that some of you are familiar with Test Driven Development or Behaviour Driven Development. I remember both of them from my Software Engineering at FEUP. When I have started doing chatbots, I have discovered something else, conversation-driven development.

According to the article entitled Conversation Driven Development found of Rasa blog:

Conversation-driven development (CDD) is the process of listening to your users and using those insights to improve your AI assistant.

The article states that the biggest problem for chatbot developer is anticipating user’s input. Instead of assuming what they are going to ask the chatbot we give them the opportunity to say what exactly do they want.

The process of Conversation Driven Development is the following:

1. Share
2. Review
3. Annotate
4. Test
5. Track
6. Fix

Based on the project I have done for my master degree dissertation and some other projects, I have prepared a case study of conversation-driven development for a chatbot for Erasmus exchange students coming to the foreign university.

Framework: Rasa + Rasa X

Purpose: The objective of the project is to assist Erasmus students coming to the university from many different countries and trying to navigate their student life in Poland. They require information about the procedures, documents, professors and campus life.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Case Study: Building Appointment Booking Chatbot

2. IBM Watson Assistant provides better intent classification than other commercial products according to published study

3.Testing Conversational AI

4. How intelligent and automated conversational systems are driving B2C revenue and growth.

1. Share — according to the process it is good to share your chatbots with test users early on. I usually don’t spend much time deliberating on dialogue flows. I design a simple diagram with some paths to follow, I train the chatbot in Rasa and call my friends asking them to help. Usually, I make my chatbot available through ngrok tunnel but I found that this solution can be unreliable. Now I deploy my chatbot on a public server. http://35.205.219.197/guest/conversations/production/36a32a4440a84b7095ef45d55feb418c
2. Review — once some people talked to your bot, it is time to read the conversations they had. A lot of developers are focused on metrics like how many people have used that intent but it is better to just sit and read through the conversations because people may have interacted with the chatbot, not in the way that you have expected but it could be that their path should be included in the next version. Rasa X has the option of looking at the previous chats.

3. Annotate — after going through conversations it is time see the intents that would be great candidates to improve your chatbot’s NLU. You can see them in NLU inbox and mark them as correct. Otherwise, you can change the desired intent or create a new one.

4. Test — You can use the previous conversations as test stories that will allow to further verify your chatbot. You can write them in the test directory of your Rasa project and run them often to check how well your bot is performing or you could automatically convert the successful dialogues with the chatbot you had into test stories once the bot is on the server and it is connected to the version control.

rasa test

Testing chatbots in Rasa is not just about the stories. You can evaluate the nlu understanding, checking intent classification and so on. I will probably devote a second article just to the art of extensive chatbot testing.

5. Track — you have to track how well your chatbot is doing. For instance, is the chatbot successful in convincing people to use your online store or how often a particular user is taking to the bot and is she satisfied? You can track the sentiment of the conversation with BERT or just simple logistic regression or Bayes rules.

6. Fix — analyse the conversations based on the performance. If they went smoothly they can become part of the testing set. If not, find out what you need to improve. You could need more training data or fix your custom actions.

Conversation driven approach is user-centric. It is certain that it needs time and attention. I have to often jump between many different stages. Nevertheless, I am working on creating a great chatbot which adapts to the user and not another way around. After all, this is what good conversation is all about.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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I’m learning all the time — conversation-driven development in a chatbot for Erasmus students with… was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.