Bots on the Web, Bots in your App: Botkit Anywhere
Today we are announcing that Botkit can now be used to create conversational apps and AI-powered agents for the web, without any external messaging platforms, using Botkit Anywhere.
We have a vision of a conversational software future where people will interact naturally with connected services of all types. It isn’t about the narrow field of “enterprise bots.” It is about a paradigm shift towards software that is context-aware, multi-modal, and integrated into normal human life in a way that traditional user interfaces just can’t be.
The bots we’ve been talking about for the last few years most often live inside other apps like Slack and Facebook Messenger. If your goal is getting things done in Slack, there are a plethora of amazing bots ready to help you. But most things that get done on the internet — like shopping, reading news, and using your bank — are still happening outside of Slack, on the biggest, most exciting and most heavily used digital communication platform in history: the web.
“With Botkit Studio, our team can effortlessly manage a complex dialog system AND easily integrate the bot right into our women’s health app” — Jason Mattiace/Ask Tia
Botkit’s new capabilities offer a powerful way of embedding conversational experiences into any website or native app. Jason Mattiace, head of engineer at Ask Tia chose to build their native iOS app with Botkit’s API. “With Botkit Studio, our team can effortlessly manage a complex dialog system AND easily integrate the bot right into our women’s health app,” he said.
The Next Frontier for Botkit Bots
Botkit Anywhere dramatically increases the surface available to bots, and it allows bots and other types of real-time messaging applications to be built with technology familiar to millions of developers. Just remix our sample app, and you’ve got a working bot that can be embedded in your website. It includes a customizable HTML-based chat UI and a built-in messaging server ready to host thousands of simultaneous one-on-one chats.
One of the top features our users want is for their bot to be able to answer common questions for customers. Botkit Anywhere includes a brand new “learning mode” to help quickly teach a bot how to respond to these questions without writing any code. Just chat with one of our bots and it will set itself up for you!
Check out the video of this in action:
What can bots do on the web?
- Answer common questions and direct users to resources. A concierge that answer questions about a restaurant’s hours, location and menu, or a company’s products and services.
- Integrate with existing user accounts, order history and other features. A personalized checkout assistant in your shopping cart.
- Guide a user through a tasks like onboarding or a multi-step configuration process
- Provide a novel and personalized user experience with interactive messaging as the interface
Botkit bots are built with a tightly deeply integrated set of tools that includes content management, analytics and operational tools that tell you what your bot is doing, how it is being used, and by who. Now, they work on any website in the world.
We draw our inspiration from the cool stuff that our developer community builds with our products every day. With every new feature we build into the platform and tools, we see ingenious new applications appear in the bots we use every day.
Time and again, we’ve heard from developers that “if only the platforms would do this one thing…” Well, we can stop waiting now, and see what happens now that these bots can live outside of the little boxes we put them in!
Get in touch with us to discuss ways you can use Botkit at your company. We can help you build the perfect robotic assistant.
