Enthusiasm for chat as a platform for user engagement has officially reached a fevered pitch. Last week, Microsoft unveiled its Bot Platform, a complete set of development and deployment services for building and hosting conversational agents. And this week Facebook garnered headlines in opening up Messenger to external chatbot developers.

Asaf Amir, CEO of UK-based BetterBrand, sees huge potential for early adopters in engaging potential customers and fans using conversational bots. We spoke with Amir just as the company was launching its chat marketing platform, which is an end-to-end development and support framework for building and launching marketing chatbots.

While Amir acknowledged that there is a lot of hype around chatbots and artificial intelligence, his company is focused on providing practical tools that enable publishers, celebrities, and brands to quickly get up and running with chat-based conversational interfaces and track the performance of their campaigns.

I got a brief glimpse at the BetterBrand toolset. In some ways, the platform has similarities to the chatbot building tools that have been around for a decade a more. The heart of any chatbot is the conversation. Chatbot builders often have tools that can help you construct threaded conversations. BetterBrands offers a powerful graphical conversation manager where you can build out the entire conversation, constructing possible user inputs and scripting the chatbot’s responses.

The BetterBrand tool is also designed to make it relatively simple to deploy chatbots to multiple messaging platforms. Right now that process has manual steps, because most chat platforms require user accounts to be set up or other manual steps to occur. But in the future, the process of a deploying a chatbot across multiple platforms should be more seamless.

BetterBrand also offers business intelligence tools to track the performance of the chat app marketing campaign. For now, you still need to make adjustments to the campaign manually, But the goal is to make the platform smart enough to adjust itself. Are certain phrases or offers getting clicks, while others are not? The platform will keep track of the more successful engagement methods and prefer those going forward, for example.

While frameworks such as Microsoft’s Bot Platform seem to be more geared towards developers, BetterBrand’s suite of tools should be easy to use by marketing teams. Lowering the barriers to entry should encourage more publishers and brands to experiment with chatbots and prove to themselves if these conversational bots are worth all the hype.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: intelligent Assistants, chatbots, BetterBrand