Didn't get a chance to make it to Chatbot Summit Berlin 2017? Thats okay- Recime has you covered! Hear about the best talks of the summit, learn about some of the top brands and startups represented at the summit and gain some insight about the bot industry from the experts at San Fransisco based startup, Recime
Article by Jean-Marc Ly, Growth Marketer & Entrepreneur
Our team at Recime had the chance to participate in the Chatbot Summit in Berlin and learn how the chatbot industry fared in Europe. We had a wonderful time and met so many developers, startups, agencies and people just curious about the bots.
Informative Talks
The Chatbot Summit kicked off with an opening keynote by event founder, Yoav Barel with stats about the industry and companies involved.
Yoav, who was previously head of Mobile Product & Strategy at LivePerson explains to the crowd how big brands especially those in Europe look at the bot space as a way to reinvent themselves and how the app era is slowing down. App fatigue is high among users and bots are a possible experience to help brands connect with their customer.
There was also panel talks throughout the day from insightful individuals including Peer Bentzen, VP of Deutsche Post and Franz Weisenburger, VP of Deutsche Telekom. I was able to learn that many European companies are accepting of bots and already implementing them throughout their customer service. These companies were approaching startups with open thoughts and proactively engaging them to tackle this industry. Deutsche Telekom has been experiment with bots for 2 years. Especially in customer service.
“Our vision is to replace permanent dialogue in the future.”
“We get 6 million [customer service] calls and 1 million [customer bot] chats a year. We want to decrease call and increase chat use to free our team and lower cost.”
“I don’t need a bot to be empathetic but I do need have a relationship with it”
One notable question asked by an attendee was on the psychology of interacting with bots and if it would make sense to implant the “soul” of a person into a bot… say creating an Elon Musk bot after he passes away. “My brain doesn’t die but it lives on. In the future, it may be possible to create a version of you as a bot with your personal algorithm. It may not be the Steve Jobs bot that we want but rather a bot of your father that passed away and you want to interact with some time to time.”
Talks was split among 4 categories: The Center Stage for more high level industry overview, the Product and UX stage for discussion designing conversation UX, the Dev and AI stage for panel talks about creating smarter bots, capturing data and the evolution of bots and the last stage, the Amazon Alexa Workshop training people on designing voice driven experiences.
There were many topics about designing & creating bots for Enterprises. It felt as this was the only focus startups should be aiming to. While Recime, helps developers build bots for Enterprises, we actively encourage our developers to build bots as a hobby and for their entertainment and learning. It seemed that everyone here was aiming at the enterprise space while ignoring the individual developer.
The Rise of the Botrepreneur
Throughout the day, we met so many bot developers, many of them whom are depending on creating bots for their income. We received numerous feedbacks on their needs as well as their take on the bot space in Europe. As a developer tool, we aim to make it easy for developers and happy to find many of them knew of our platform already. From our conversation, we could tell that many of these developers were very passionate and building advanced bots and not your usual, fun chatbots, but actually business use cases. We also met up with numerous agencies and product managers looking to create bots for both internal use and for their clients. Everyone talks about chatbots but not everyone understands them. These agencies were looking at bots to help automate their workflow and their team’s efficiencies.
Notable Startups
There were quite a few startups and founders visiting and showcasing their company. The few that stood out to me were: Crowdflower (who also happens to be from SF like us), Recast.ai (from Paris) and Rasa.ai (Berlin) for Machine learning and Natural Language Understanding. Heroes.ai (by Swell) combines the power of social influencers and bots by creating them so you can engage your fans across different channels. Toni is a chatbot for football (soccer) fans to find the latest matches, scores and team info. Saveboost, a chatbot from Spain helps people save and micro-invest their money and Botanalytics was the only bot analytics platform on the showroom.
Elevate by The Ventury was interesting as It’s the first European bot accelerator based out of Vienna, Austria (although you don’t have to be from Europe to apply).
We had a booth of our own showcasing our platform and our CLI.
Industry Infancy
Overall it felt as though the industry still has a long way to grow but it was exciting to see so many players, startups, developers and even the German government sent a representative to check out how the space is. It was a delightful experience and we are happy we could be part of it.
Recime.io is an enterprise developer platform to build cross-platform bots, saving you time and cost. It is free for personal and open-source bots and royalty free. If you have a bot that is solving a problem, helping the community, wanting to go cross-channel with a single code-base, understands aesthetics and deeply cares about user experience, then we would love to hear from you! Please reach out to us at: hello@recime.io.
To view the original article by Jean-Marc Ly on Chatbotslife click here
