Creativity is a purely human thing… is it? AI never fails to surprise us and make our jaws drop, and another shocker is AI can be creative. Super creative too!

How is This Even Possible?

In order for AI engines to really bring out their creative side, they use what’s called a generative model. A generative model is a type of machine learning where the model processes the input and then uses it to generate a new output.

For example, This Person Doesn’t Exist generates faces that don’t actually exist after having processed a massive amount of data related to people.

Believe me when I say generative models really blow my mind by how creative they can get. Which is why we’re sharing with you the most common times when AI got really creative!

AI and Scriptwriting

There’re several times when people experimented with feeding AI movie scripts and then watching it generate a script of its own. Two of the most distinctive times were the Batman script and Sunspring. The Batman script was created after feeding the model all Batman scripts, and the output was a new Batman scenario, which was totally hilarious!

The Sunspring script, on the other hand, was made with thriller movie data and was made into a short movie. Needless to say, the script made no sense whatsoever!

AI and Music

OpenAI’s MuseNet is a revolution on its own. MuseNet processes a huge amount of musical compositions, and can beautifully compose music.

AI and Painting

This is one of the times when it was super creative and really on-point. The applications of AI with painting are endless; however, Portrait of Edmond de Belamy and the Van Gogh experiment really stand out. 

The Portrait of Edmond de Belamy was created when a model was fed data about Renaissance art, then asked to create a painting in the same style.

The result was apparently worth $432.5K!

Moreover, The Van Gogh experiment was executed by feeding a model data on Van Gogh’s style, then feeding it Starry Night and the photo of the location Van Gogh meant to showcase through his masterpiece. 

Consequently, the model was also fed a photo of a specific location, and asked to create a painting of it in Van Gogh’s Starry Night’s style, and the result was so incredible!

AI and poetry

It looks like Shakespeare has a competitor! An AI model was fed poems and consequently asked to write poems of its own, and sometimes the poems were really good; other times, the poems “sounded like an angsty teenager writing poetry”.

AI and Journalism

The Associated Press announced that they’ll be using AI generative models as journalists in their sports section to expand their coverage. Basically, the model is supposed to work by watching sports games, then being asked to write articles about the games; focusing on the parts “human journalists” miss.

Surprisingly, this new shift in journalism is not just in The Associated Press. Forbes, The Washington Post, The LA Times, and more are also going down that road.

AI and Design

Looka made branding the easiest it’s ever been. Looka uses AI to help business owners get all their branding designs needs; from logos to even web design, and with no human interference at all!

AI and Writing

OpenAI did it once again! Their Better Language Model is a writing model that collects data from the internet as it goes. Users can share a prompt or sentence with it, and it will turn that prompt/sentence into a story, an article, or even a poem! You can try its latest version from here.

Let’s Get Started

Chatbots have been around long enough for people to start wondering, question themselves, and even get super mythological about. Which is totally fine while getting used to something new in our ever-changing era.

To make it easier for you, we’ve elaborated five of the most common chatbots myths.

Chatbots are a Very New Thing

2016 was the year chatbots started being everywhere: developing and flourishing; in fact, some people actually call it the chatbot year. But that doesn’t mean chatbots were first created in 2016, because surprise: chatbots came way earlier than this, as the first chatbot ever, ELIZA, was created 50 years before “the chatbot year”: in 1966, and actually came equipped with A.I.

Chatbots Only Deliver Results in Specific Industries

Chatbots can actually be used in almost every single industry. They can serve every customer’s need, and any business can build a chatbot and benefit from it. A restaurant can use it for food ordering, an e-commerce website can use it for sales, a mall can use it to assist visitors, and the list goes on & on… Whatever you may need, chatbots are here!

To Build a Chatbot, You Must have a Technical Background

At the end of the day, chatbots are technology, and for people who are not that into technology, that’s very scary. But who said you have to be tech savvy at all to benefit from a chatbot? Look around you, it’s 2019 and bot builders are here to save the day.

Chatbots Have Limited Potential

Chatbots just reply to people, right? Wrong!

Chatbots can do so much more than that, as:

• Interacting with users in their own language (and slang).
• Engaging with followers.
• Taking customer service to the next level.
• Selling products (full process).
• Automating long, boring processes in general.

And so much much more! Let’s put it this way: As chatbots are conversational, and hence, can complete any action you can take within the conversation.

Chatbots Provide The Same Experience to All Users

A lot of people think if you build a chatbot, it’s just a one paragraph will be sent to all users, but this is totally wrong as well. Chatbots can personalize each user’s experience to be specifically tailored for them: For their needs and who they are (interests, past activity, …etc). Through chatbots, you can make every single users’ experience special, unique, and truly theirs.

Let’s Get Started

Isn’t it just about time to build a chatbot, don’t you think?

Building a chatbot is becoming easier and easier every day, but one of the biggest obstacles when building a chatbot (and well, anything else) is not knowing exactly where to start or what to do. No matter how easy building a one is, it’ll always feel difficult if you don’t have a guide about what to do.

We know how frustrating that is, which is why we’re equipping you with the list of things you need to do in order to successfully build a chatbot:

1. Determine Your Bot’s Purpose

Before starting building your bot, you have to settle on why you’re building it. Is the bot meant to improve customer service? Is it meant to drive sales? Do you want it to market for yourself?

There’re so many reasons why you might need a chatbot, and deciding on a purpose for your it is the first and most important step you need.

2. Decide Your Bot’s Type (e.g. Rule-based / AI-based)

Next, you need to decide on the type of your chatbot. There’re three main types of bots: Ones that use buttons to interact, ones that respond according to specific keywords, and ones that use natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to interact with the user.

Deciding the type is crucial for you to be able to decide on the rest of things concerning your chatbot.

3. Choose Which Channel You’ll Build Your Chatbot On

There’re a lot of channels for your chatbot to be present on, such as: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Your website (webchat), Twitter, Slack, Telegram, …. and the list goes & goes until even Google Assistant and Alexa.

Deciding in advance what channel your bot will be on will help you with a lot of later details, as features may differ from a channel to another, especially that the channels are usually the first thing bot builders ask about.

4. Decide on Which Platform You’ll Build Your Chatbot

After you choose which channel(s) you’ll build your chatbot on, it’s time to get to building it. And the first step to do that is to decide which bot-builder platform you’re going to use.

Choosing the platform mainly depends on your requirements, the platform features, the channels the platform support, and the newness of the technology it uses.

5. Determine Your Bot’s Persona

You have a personality that defines you, and so should your chatbot. Determining who your bot is makes all the difference in how it interacts with the audience. Defining your bot’s persona should come from what is your business and who your customers are.

Below is the Brand Personality Framework, it should help you with deciding on your brand and bot’s personality.

The bot’s persona includes also its name, style, voice, and tones.

• Choosing Your Bot’s Name

Based on your bot’s persona, you need to come up with a name that fits your persona. Your name could be choosing a human name for your bot, choosing a robotic name for your bot, making it the company’s name, making the name the purpose of the bot, or using a clever name for a bot that uses, for example, acronyms or such.

The table below will help you with which name type to choose.

Your bot’s personality and purpose make all the difference when choosing the name, which is why you need to do these first 🔂

• Coming up with Your Bot’s Tone (Style, Voice, Tones, …)

Now that you have a general image of how your chatbot is, you need to start getting into details to make it work. And that is starting by imagining how your bot interacts with its users as in their voice, the tones it uses, and their speech style.

 Is your bot going to have a friendly voice with fun tones? Is your bot dead-serious with super formal tones? Is your bot going to use a Shakespearean style in his speech, or a super casual one? (Shakespearean would be really cool by the way!)

When choosing your bot’s tone, bear in mind the four dimensions below.

This article can help you understand more what is a bot persona.

6. Choose The Types of Flows and Interactions with Users

As you’re supposed to be starting to build your chatbot now, you have to decide what flows you want your bot to go by with your users. This will also depend essentially on the bot’s purpose, the type of it, and the bot-builder possibilities itself.

7. Publish Your Chatbot!

Life is just a “ready, set, go!” at the common, right? Well, this is your go moment. Publish your bot, but don’t announce it just yet because you still need to…

8. Test, Test, and… *wait for it* … Test!

Before you announce your chatbot to the public, you still need to test it for performance, responsiveness, and accuracy, to make sure there’re as little errors as possible. When done with that, it’s now time to start promoting it.

9. Promoting Your Chatbot

Go public and go crazy now, you’ve earned it! Start promoting and advertising your new software masterpiece.

So to wrap it up, here’s a checklist with all the steps you need to go through to build a successful chatbot:

Let’s Get Started

Who doesn’t want to enhance their customer relationship? 

Customers are the true core of any business. Nowadays, customers don’t just want to buy products; they want to know about it, how you’re selling it, and what exactly happens after they buy your product.

Customers are no longer in just for the product, but rather expecting good experience and an even better relationship. We both know what happens when customers don’t get the experience they expect: Bad. Reviews. 

Forget Annabelle, this is an absolute horror movie from another level to any business.

I’ve seen it myself, just one bad review can cost your business more customers than you think and more than you’ll ever know. 

Why Do You Need to Build a Good Customer Relationship?

Take a step back and see the big picture here; it’s not just a purchase. A happy customer can benefit your business in many ways than financially. So here are the main domains you need to bond your relationship with your customers in.

Customer Retention

Having a good relationship with your customers makes them stay. There’re many people that can do exactly what you do; it’s the small things that matter. 

Customer retention is whether your customer stays as your customer or not, and how well do they stay. Do they actively engage with you, are they just existing, or didn’t they stay at all?

The way you treat your customers matters, the way you handle your angry customers matters, and the way you plan on keeping your customers matters. Your relationship with your customers determines whether they remain your customers or seek a better customer relationship.

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is as simple as whether what you provided the customer leveled up to his expectations or not. Take this as an example: If I subscribe to an internet package, I expect to have a proper internet connection. If the internet is too slow or doesn’t even work, I am not a satisfied customer; what I received was below my expectations.

In this example, I don’t even have to call their support and complain. In fact, 91% of customers never do. They just leave even without a goodbye 👋🏻

When you’re approachable and have a good customer relationship, your customers will reach out and express their concerns with trust; especially when they know you’ll take care of their concerns.

Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is where you’ve built such a good relationship with your customers that they’ll choose you no matter how tempted they’re to switch to a competitor.

When you give your customers such a good experience and build such a strong relationship, your customers feel pampered in your experience; they feel connected to your business, and as a result, they become loyal.

Loyal customers are 9 times more likely to buy your products. That’s how important good customer relationships are! Some customers are even so loyal, they’ll promote your business for you because they believe in it: they just simply became that loyal because of your good relationship with them.

How Can You Build Good Customer Relationship?

There’re a lot of ways to build good customer relationships. Some of the typical practices include training your employees on how to handle and treat your customers, customer engagement, personalizing sales, optimizing the content, and the list goes on and on…

Chatbots Take on Improving Your Customer Relationship 

While all of the ways above are very efficient, they may take a lot of time to execute, and a simple human error can ruin them all. Not to mention the factors of time, money, and effort. Where you may have little of each.

A chatbot may not be the first thing that comes to your mind when thinking of improving your customer relationship, I mean, a relationship is literally defined as the way people are connected. And in that manner, a chatbot is a program, so how is that even possible? (If I was a chatbot, I’d have felt offended by now. Maybe they have feelings too 😔)

But in fact, chatbots are the perfect fit here! As there’re three factors that a chatbot can work do very efficiently and smoothly, challenging human capabilities: Customer engagement, experience personalization, and quality of service.

Customer Engagement

Nothing can engage with your customers like a chatbot, and every engagement comes with the same energy. The real-time conversation experience encourages customers to engage back with your brand; it makes them feel welcomed at any time.

Chatbots can also carry on tens of thousands of conversations at the same time with no delay or confusion, while a human can literally never pull that off. There’s a maximum number of the customers human can chat with at the same time, and it isn’t even a percentage of the ones a chatbot can do.

You can use a chatbot to engage with your customer for in many ways, starting with as simple as to entertain them to as important as closing sales and resolving their concerns, and it won’t get bored along the way.

Experience Personalization

Not only does a chatbot seamlessly engage with your customers, but it can make every single experience different, which is something impossible for humans to do. Chatbots collect user data and study it to understand the customers better, approach them better, and even get picky about how to approach them.

This would be easy for a human to pull off if we’re talking about a limited number of customers, but chatbots can literally personalize the experience to *EVERY SINGLE USER* who uses the chatbot; they can use every single chat to know the customer more, and personalize based on it.

This can make every single customer experience unique and makes the customers feel much appreciated.

Quality of Service

Your customers can interact with your chatbot right where they message their friends. No need to visit a website or make a special phone call to do that. Chatbots give your customers 24/7 service, and as mentioned above, you can customize this service tirelessly without any extra costs.

Your chatbot can gather leads, engage, sell, handle customers, and as much as you want it to do.

A well-crafted chatbot can provide service that will turn any customer into a super loyal customer, and build a great customer relationship with.

Let’s Get Started

So you’ve built your chatbot, brought it to light and made it public, and now you’re going to delete it? Grrr, wait! Why are you going to delete it? You just built it!

We all know this scenario. You took the step to build your chatbot, worked on perfecting, then brought it to light so people would start benefiting from your masterpiece of software, but bam – no one used it at all! And so; you just throw that artwork in the trash and delete your chatbot.

After all, the reason why we build bots is for our users to use them; whether it’s to answer their concerns, serve them, or sell to them. 

If our users never use our bots, then our bots are… *I don’t even want to say it* but… a waste cost, time, effort, and precious precious code. I had to said it 🤷🏻‍♂️

Why Aren’t Your Users Using Your Chatbot?

How did that masterpiece go waste? Let’s think of all the possible reasons that can drive someone to stop using your chatbot. 

1. Your users don’t understand your bot: As we said in our last blog post, always track how well your users understand your bot and interact with it based on that, so you can upgrade it to be more understandable.
2. Your bot is not of much help: What’s the point of a very understandable chatbot if it’s useless? Chatbots should either assist, serve, sell to, or at the very least entertain users. These are the basic chatbot uses.
3. Your bot is hard to reach: Your bot is amazing, but people don’t know how to reach it or you made it too hard. The bot shouldn’t only be reachable through going on Facebook, clicking on the “Send Message” button, and clicking on “Get Started”.

How Can I make My Chatbot More Reachable?

Why do ads on social media, television, radio, or even billboards work? Let’s take a beverage company for an example. You’re driving on the highway, and you see a billboard for that beverage. Then it’s on the radio, maybe also on the TV, and perhaps on social media. It’s everywhere! 

So now, you’re craving that beverage. You know which beverage I’m talking about.

Now, I know what you might be thinking of: No, don’t put a billboard for your chatbot for sure. So 90s 🙅🏻‍♂️

Your chatbot is already on Facebook. Imagine every time someone checks your website it prompts him to interact with it. A dream, right? Well, not anymore!

Using Facebook Native Plugins to Make Your Chatbot Easily Reachable

You can use several Facebook plugins to make reaching your chatbot easier than ever. Here’s some of them that work like magic.

1. The Customer Chat Plugin

This plugin allows you to integrate your Messenger experience directly into your website. Amazing, right? Allowing your users to interact with your business anytime with the same personalized experience they get in Messenger, or even complete a conversation with they originally started on Messenger. Read more about and apply it from here.

2. The Send to Messenger Plugin

This plugin is used on your website to trigger a specific authenticated event to your chatbot. It literally directs your users to use your chatbot on Messenger easier than ever! Read more about and apply it from here.

3. The Message Us Plugin

Similar to the Send to Messenger Plugin, the Message Us Plugin also gets embedded on your website to send visitors directly to start chatting with your chatbot. (Imagine how driving all or most of the traffic your website gets to your bot would grow it!) Read more about and apply it from here.

4. The Checkbox Plugin

Now this plugin is tricky and the good kind of tricky ones too! When your users are filling a form on your website, there will be a checkbox for them to opt-in to subscribing to your chatbot. Read more about and apply it from here.

Bonus, Simple Hacks

Other than Facebook plugins, there’re some simpler (somehow too simple) hacks you can use to help growing your bot. 

1. The Customized Messenger Links (m.me links)

Rather than like a gazillion number in your Messenger bot link, you can create a customized Messenger m.me link that should usually be your business name [https://m.me/(Business Name)]. That way, people can almost never forget how to reach you again. Read more and apply it from here.

2. Using The Proper Built-In Call-to-Action (CTA)

Using Facebook Pages’ built-in call-to-action button to prompt people to send a message to your page to immediately start using your chatbot when they visit your page.

To setup your call to action button: 

• Click + Add a Button below your page’s cover photo.
• Select a Contact you (Send Message) button from the dropdown menu.
• Select Send Message.
• Click Next.
• Select Messenger and click finish.

Once the button has been created, you can test your button:

• Hover over your button.
• Select Test Button.

3. Utilizing Your Cover Photo

Use the Facebook cover photo (or video, go crazy!) to say: “Hey guys, we have a chatbot and it’s usable here and it does this, and this, and that.” Otherwise, how will they know you have a one right under your cover photo?

Pro Tip: Even better, there’s an option in Facebook Pages settings that prompts a chat pop-up with your bot whenever your fans visit your page.

That’s a lot of growth hacks actually, use all or one at least, and watch your chatbot never getting lonely again!

Let’s Get Started

Why do we need chatbots analytics? We, as humans, need feedback to be able to understand where we’re excelling and what we need to work on; we need a little bit of guidance to know which way to go.

Chatbots are no different. In order to build, create, and successfully manage a chatbot, you need to pause every now and then and check how your bot is performing: what’s working, what isn’t, what can stay and what needs to go.

Otherwise, your bot will never evolve, and at some point, will most probably give you little to no ROI.

Which is why you need to analyze the results of your efforts, to understand more and improve inevitably.

What Do I Analyze?

There’re always specific key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can track and analyze in order to understand your bot efforts better.

Those are four basic, essential metrics you can track to understand your bot better. Those metrics are more focused on tracking your engagement and retention rates.

Based on your industry and needs, you can track other metrics such as engaged users, total conversations, retention rate, and user satisfaction.

The most important, basic KPIs are as follow:

Active Users

You need to know how your bot is performing in general; how many people are talking to your bot actively? Moreover, how many people are using your chatbot on a regular basis? more importantly, how are people finding your chatbot?

Besides tracking the active users, you also need to track the new ones, the engaged ones, as well as the new engaged ones.

Session Length

How long do people interact with your bot? Let’s face it, some bots are boring, some are annoying, and some are pretty fun! You need to observe how much time people spend chatting with your bot, and what is affecting their session length.

A long session doesn’t necessarily mean your bot is performing well, and vice versa. A long session can mean your user and bot couldn’t understand each other; meanwhile, a short session can mean your bot is so efficient that the user was able to benefit from it straight away.

Which is why you sometimes need to skim through the chats to understand your bot’s performance even better.

Chatbot Ratings

What’s a better way to know what people think of your chatbot than actually asking them? Listen to your users to ratings to your chatbot because it may raise a flag for you when your users are suffering, or reassure you when everything with it is fine.

Chatbot Fallback Responses

Fallback responses are the automated messages your chatbot uses when it doesn’t understand the user’s input. Now, think, how many times does your chatbot not understand the user? You need to track those because it’s a major red flag if your chatbot uses a lot of fallback responses.

Now, How Do I Measure These Things?

Measuring those on your own is exhausting and will most probably be pointlessly inaccurate. Based on that, you now have the below options:

1. Native Facebook Messenger Insights.
2. Third-party tools.
3. The bot funnel.

1. Using The Native Facebook Insights Analytics

You can use the “Messages” tab present in the Page Insights section on your page to track how your messages are performing. The insights here will be very similar to the normal Facebook Pages insights.

You can also use Facebook Analytics tool as it now supports Messenger bots to track how your bot is performing.

If those metrics are not enough for you, you can use third-party tools for more profound metrics.

2. Using Third-party Chatbots Analytics Tools

Third-party tools come with a variety of options, and each one is inevitably different. Deciding which tool(s) to use depends on your needs as well.

Here are our pick for chatbots analytics tools:

• Dashbot

Dashbot provides bot-specific analytics and comes packed with a lot of features, including but not limited to: conversational analytics, audience demographics, user behavior analytics, comparison metrics, and more.

• Chatbase

Chatbase is Google’s chatbot analytics platform that can also be used to build AI-powered virtual agents and provide analytics for those agents.

Being a Google product, Chatbase naturally comes packed with suggested intent and machine learning features, A/B testing features, transcripts, reports, integrations, and much much more.

• BotAnalytics

BotAnalytics is a conversational analytics tool focused on analyzing engagement and retention measurement for chatbots. Some of the breathtaking features of BotAnalytics include but are not limited to analytics & user/conversation metrics, segmentation of conversations, and funnels & events analysis.

• BotMetrics

BotMetrics is characterized by its simple API that allows you to track your bot with one simple request. With a simple dashboard, conversation analysis, and retention tracking. BotMetrics is quite different.

• StatsBot

Statsbot is an analytics software designed to easily work with raw data stored in modern data warehouses. It queries and transforms data and does background jobs to optimize heavy calculations for better performance.

• Statbot

Statbot is a powerful Discord statistics bot with a web dashboard you can track messages, voice, member flow, invites and much more.

3. Using Bot Funnels

What is a bot funnel?

Quite similar to the marketing funnel, a bot funnel is used to track how successfully the user is interacting with the bot.  

Why bot funnels?

The important thing about bot funnels is that not only do they provide you insights on how your bot is performing, but more importantly, they give you deep insight on how to improve it.

You can use the bot funnel in any of the three ways below:

1. Organically using the bot funnel

This is the standard, basic bot funnel that you can use. However, you can make your own bot funnel, decide what is the start point and end/success point in your funnel that means your user’s interaction with the bot was successful. And use basic metrics or just track conversations to identify where exactly your user is in your bot funnel.

The con about this is that it might be inaccurate and is definitely exhausting.

2. Using the bot funnel through Facebook Analytics

Inside Facebook Messenger Insights, there’s an organic bot funnel section. Through which, you can choose the metrics that form your bot funnel, and track your user’s position in the funnel based on that.

The only con to that is that you’re tied up to Facebook’s metrics, which are relatively limited.

3. Using the bot funnels through third-party tools

Just like with Facebook Messenger Insights, there is also an organic bot funnel inside most of (if not all of) third-party analytics tools.

The super-pro with using third-party analytics tools is that they’re extra-customizable when it comes to the metrics you choose to track.

However you choose to track your bot’s success, now you know the most important things you need to know about chatbots analytics from the why to the where to the how.

Let’s Get Started