Record Bird

@__tosh Thanks for hunting and introducing our chatbot to the community here on Product Hunt today. We believe bots can offer a playful way for users to interact with our product with the smallest friction possible. Users remain in the well known environment of their messaging app and little to no effort is required to evaluate the potential of a new product or getting to a specific information super quickly. I'm here with our CTO @graf_arnold today to answer any questions you might have! Let's do this! :) Try our bot: http://m.me/recordbird

@__tosh we're quietly rolling out a brand new version of our #chatbot for @recordbird_com & wanted to give you an early look! Wanna give it a spin? http://m.me/recordbird

@quadres Not at all, we'll launch our iOS app this summer! :) We believe that bots and apps simply fulfil a different purpose: Bots help users to easily experiment with new products. They make a first contact painless. Also, they can be very helpful to deliver short pieces of information to a user within a highly relevant environment. (Companies now have a touchpoint with users which was previously strictly limited to friends, family and colleagues). Native apps is still where the deep engagement takes place. I highly doubt that bots will replace apps in the future - nor should they. The interface and engagement is likely to limited - generic and not customised - to fully support each experience. We do believe though, that bots can be the next big thing in any product’s user acquisition cycle. Lastly, we didn't involve our users when making the decision to develop a bot. The topics is probably still too new, few people - apart from the PH community - currently grasp the full potential of this opportunity. Nevertheless, we involved various different users in the development of the bot experience which was crucial for its development.

@quadres we're quietly rolling out a brand new version of our #chatbot for @recordbird_com & wanted to give you an early look! Wanna give it a spin? http://m.me/recordbird

@smalzner @mahringer_a hi Stefan, having jumped on the node.js train a while ago, we used an npm package to provide the webhook (simply called “messenger-bot”). Although Facebook’s docs for the API were still brand new, integration with it was quite pain-free (except for a few nasty typos in the specifications :)). The Record Bird bot itself is built as a micro-service that uses a graph to decide how to respond to queries. A little bit of tree-search logic tracks individual users as they move through the graph and generates replies based on that information. NLP/NLA is obviously a huge topic for us, and we plan to use wit.ai or a similar service for basic semantic analysis, plus a bit of custom parsing logic because there are just so many different artist names / genre-name renditions out there. Wit.ai looks pretty promising as it has a very usable interface and seems really focussed on conversational analysis. Hope this helps!

@smalzner we're quietly rolling out a brand new version of our #chatbot for @recordbird_com & wanted to give you an early look! Wanna give it a spin? http://m.me/recordbird