Go to the profile of Kuan Huang
Kuan Huang
I am obsessed with an internet cat called Poncho (@ponchoIRL)

Poncho on Facebook Messenger: Three Months In

“Have you been botting lately? :D
Growing up as a bot sometimes feels like growing up as a child prodigy. I am very talented on a few things but can be dumb about many other things that seem to be simple to human beings. I have to admit, NLP is a hard problem to solve.”
— Poncho

It has been almost three months since we launched Poncho on Facebook messenger. Instead of expanding Poncho to other platforms, the team decided to have a laser point focus on improving the underlying editorial and technical infrastructure that can make Poncho a truly platform agnostic bot. In the end, we want Poncho to be your best bot friend instead of JUST an assistant. So here is some new stuff that we added to the bot:

1. This cat is getting much smarter about weather now. Since we launched the bot, the team has started building an extensive NLP integration that trains Poncho to understand more human input around weather. We are making pretty good progress so far. Try to message Poncho something like the below and I don’t think you will be disappointed:

  • What’s the weather in London at 6PM tomorrow?
  • Should I bring a scarf for my trip to Seattle this weekend?
  • Is it warm in Paris?
  • Is it going to rain in 4 hours?

We couldn’t have done this without the APIs of Wit.ai. Here is an example of the amount of information Poncho can extract from a simple user input.

We are very excited about the potential of personalizing everyone’s experience with Poncho via a conversational UI.

2. We just added voice support to Poncho. In many conversational scenarios, it’s inefficient to type a long sentence just to get some simple information. This will become increasingly obvious in the near future when chat bots live not only inside messenger apps but in our homes, cars, workplaces, etc. Giving our bot the ability to take voice commands was a fundamental step to make Poncho accessible across platforms. It’s still in beta but give it try. Please let us know what you think (Shout out to Wit.ai team again!!).

As a non native english speaker who has been living in NYC for 10 years, my accent is quite unconventional :). But surprisingly the voice recognition engine was able to understand most of my questions.

3. Beta testing Poncho severe weather alerts. Whenever there’s severe weather, most media channels start up with the usual scare tactics. We’ve taken a different approach. Poncho’s alerts are more like texts from a caring friend — he doesn’t pretend to be an expert, he just wants to make sure you stay safe.

At this moment, we are only sending Severe Weather Warnings to people who live in NY, AZ, AR and IL. We definitely will expand the coverage to all the users in the near future.

4. Chit Chat?

Being useful can make Poncho a bot that you NEED but it’s not good enough to make Poncho a bot you LOVE. From day one, we knew that building a great bot is not only a technical challenge but an editorial challenge as well. Two weeks ago, we started sending out some well drafted but simple conversations to a very small set of Poncho bot users. Here is an example of a conversation we sent before the July 4th weekend:

We had 30% of people respond to the conversation within a 15 minutes window. 95% of them finished the conversation flow and wanted to continue to get more in the future. Only 1 person blocked Poncho. That’s a much higher engagement than we expected. We’re very encouraged to continue the experiments with a data driven approach.

5. Last week, Facebook Messenger team released their API V1.1 which is a big improvement to the overall bot experience. As one of the earlier partners, the Poncho team has already added in those new features and seen some improvements on our overall retention and engagement metrics. I highly recommend you implement those features.

Whether you are a developer or fan, make sure you upgrade your Messenger app to enjoy all these new features.

That’s it for now. Building an amazing bot is not a sprint but a marathon and there are tons of work ahead of us. As a team of builders, we’re just very thrilled to be able to work on something that has the potential to create a better future for everyone. I am gonna get back to work now! I look forward to giving you another update soon.

A special THANK YOU to Stephanie Chan, Greg Leuch, Ashley D’Arcy, Christian Rocha for editing and giving feedback on my draft. As always, hats off the entire Poncho team. I can’t ask for a better team to work with on this exciting product.

Previous update: Two weeks after we launched Poncho at F8

Enjoyed the article? Click the ❤ below to recommend it to other interested readers!