chatbots

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Duolingo’s new chatbots help you brush up on your foreign language conversation skills

duolingo-chat-app A lot of startups are talking about the possibilities of chatbots, but Duolingo recently launched one of the most interesting uses so far — practicing a new language. The Duolingo chatbots allow users to hold text message conversations in French, Spanish or German, with the chatbots taking on different personas to discuss different topics. You probably won’t mistake them for… Read More

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Pullstring launches bot-authoring tools for fun & profit

Humani - Jessie's Story is an interactive game based on messaging back and forth with Jessie, trying to help her get a new boyfriend, a new job and an apartment. A busy day, indeed. Pullstring — née ToyTalk — today launched its eponymous product out of private beta and into the hands of creators of conversational interfaces everywhere. Out of the box, creators can make bots for Facebook Messenger, Slack, Skype, Kik, Telegram and — using the company’s Web API — pretty much every other platform out there. Read More

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LinkedIn doubles down on education with LinkedIn Learning, updates desktop site

screen-shot-2016-09-22-at-17-49-43 LinkedIn, the social network for the working world that now has some 450 million members and is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft for $26.2 billion, today took the wraps off its newest efforts to expand its site beyond job hunting and recruitment, its two business mainstays. The company has launched a new site called LinkedIn Learning, an ambitious e-learning portal tailored… Read More

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Operator harnesses chatbots, humans, and $15M to sell US goods to China

operator-china With a little personal shopping assistance, Operator thinks Chinese citizens will pounce on American products sold through its conversational shopping app. The promise of becoming the guided commerce layer connecting China with the US has earned the two-year-old a $15 million series B round at a $100 million pre-money valuation. “We’re making commerce borderless”, Operator… Read More

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Facebook Messenger now allows payments in its 30,000 chat bots

David Marcus of Facebook Messenger Facebook today filled the biggest hole in its chatbot platform. Messenger bots can accept payments natively without sending users to an external website, Facebook’s head of Messenger David Marcus announced today onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016. Finally, the credit card info people already have stored in Facebook or Messenger can be used to instantly make purchases in bots that are… Read More

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Facebook steps in to prove the value of chatbots with Tommy Hilfiger

tommy-hilfiger-bot Here come the fashbots, and this time they might actually be useful. Facebook’s seemingly half-baked chatbot platform soured many on the potential of conversation user interfaces. The first bots built by outside developers back in April were clumsy and more trouble than just using a website. So Facebook’s Creative Shop is getting involved, working with bot maker Msg.ai and the… Read More

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Facebook’s path into the messaging future

messaging There has been quite some buzz around Facebook’s Messenger platform lately. And, almost daily, you can read new articles about chatbots, conversational interfaces, digital assistants, AI and messaging platforms. Is chat the next generation of how we connect and interact with the internet? Can Facebook’s Messenger eventually become the platform that connects all services that… Read More

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The new paradigm for human-bot communication

robot-customer-service Chatbots offer the promise of frictionless access to goods, services and information, but creating effective bots can be deceptively tricky. The flip side of the opportunity to interact with users in a seamless, natural way is that user expectations can be prohibitively high. Bots need to be smart and provide greater convenience than apps. Read More

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Operator fuses bots with humans to build cyborg shopping experts

Operator Experts Big purchases are scary to make online without anyone there to quell your fears and answer questions. Operator’s app wants to give you the same peace of mind, not with mechanical chat bot responses, but through real humans with knowledge about whatever you’re buying. Today Operator 2.0 launches with a new Discovery tab where curators assemble recommendations about their… Read More

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