Analytics, Integration, Language Understanding: The Bot Ecosystem is Exploding
The bot ecosystem continues growing at an incredible pace. This week bots seems to be taking over the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco and every day we are seeing new announcements about new and exciting technologies in the space. Interestingly enough, a lot of the recent efforts in bot technologies seem to be focused on enhancing the robustness of bot solutions. While a few months ago the emphasis seem to be in bot creation platforms like Microsoft’s Bot Framework or the Facebook Messenger Platform, these days we are seeing more effort around complementary technologies in areas like security, analytics, integration and other elements that are necessary for the mainstream adoption of bot solutions.
Like any other technology trend, bots are likely to trigger a new generation of platforms to address the new challenges of the ecosystem in areas such as security, integration, analytics and others. If we follow recent trends like mobile or IOT, these type of platforms are likely to evolve as standalone offerings and eventually be incorporated into broader bot platforms provided by messaging incumbents like Facebook, Telegram, WeChat, Microsoft, etc.
Analytics: Dashbot.io
Dashbot is a new platform focused on enabling analytics for smart bots. Conceptually, Dashbot is trying to set the standard for bot analytic technologies just like platforms like Mix Panel or Google Analytics did it for mobile and web respectively. Functionally, Dashbot provides the bot-equivalent to well-known KPIs such as user sessions, engagement or retention but also introduces new types of analytics such as sentiment analysis or conversation transcripts which are more specific to bot solutions.
Integration: Chatfuel
Yesterday, Facebook Messenger Bot platform provider Chatfuel announced that is expanding its solution with new connectors to integrated bots with external data sources. This capability will allow Chatfuel users to author bots that seamlessly access data from line of business systems such as databases, SaaS, APIs, etc. Following the Chatfuel’s rapid development model, the usage of the new connectors require no specific coding skills.
Natural Language Understanding: Pat
Pat is an artificial intelligence platform provider that is pioneering a technique known as natural language understanding (NLU) to improve conversational models. Functionally, Pat uses neural networks to detect intend and meaning in sentences but it factors in different elements of conversations such as interruptions, changes on subject etc. Yesterday, Pat announced that it has raised $2,5M seed round to help developed it NLU technology.
