Talkabot ATX: September ’17 Recap
Bots for the enterprise, An intro to Microsoft Teams, Curating information for conferences, and Bot design tips from Botmock!
As the product manager for both the Howdy bot and our Botkit bot building framework, I have a bit of an ulterior motive at play when programing our Talkabot meetups. My goal is to get all the smartest people I can in one room, and then pick their brains on all the cool stuff they are building.
This is not only extremely helpful to furthering my personal understanding of our industry, but also serves our community goals of expanding awareness of best practices for conversational interfaces to be used by both people in our industry today, and all the thousands that will be joining our ranks in the coming years.
In particular, the kind of speaker topics I am really looking for are of the following varieties:
- We built something cool! — Introductions to really novel and interesting bots.
- We learned something unexpected! — Often the road to creation forces some unique learning experiences. I personally love to hear as much about what did not work as what did.
- And here is how you can do it in your own work! — Knowledge acquired, but hoarded within an organization does not help our industry as a whole. We must strive to share and normalize basic processes so when we gather to discuss tools, we can then focus primarily on the problem we are seeking to solve, and not the basic vocabulary of the tools we use.
Our August meetup was my first crack at meeting these goals, and I think it turned out pretty well! Check out the following talks, and be sure to subscribe to our Youtube channel to stay up to date on all our talks as they are posted.
The Talks
Ben Brown, Howdy— What’s cool about Microsoft Teams:
Fresh off the release of official support of Microsoft Teams for Howdy’s Botkit open source bot framework, Ben provides a quick primer on what developers should be excited about in the newest workplace chat platform, and how you can use team-specific features to make truly unique, productivity expanding experiences for your Team’s based workplace.
Chris Traganos , VP of Developer Experience at Message.io on a “A Developer’s Guide to Enterprise Chat Platforms”
An inside look at Slack, Cisco Spark, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts Chat, and Atlassian (HipChat + Stride) from a developer’s point of view. Understand the common traits across their APIs, underlying differences between platforms, and where workplace chat is heading.
Obaid Ahmed , Developer at Botmock on “Designing Chatbot Conversations using Botmock”
In this talk we will look at some of the ways you can design good conversations for your chatbot. We will build a conversation from scratch for Facebook Messenger and talk about the key ways you can think about architecting your conversational interface.
Jayneil Dalal, Chatbot designer at AT&T — Building Beautiful Bots
With more than 100,000 chatbots built on the Facebook Messenger platform alone, industry experts are claiming bots as the next big frontier in tech. Beautiful bots delight us. In this hands-on talk, Jayneil will share his journey for designing chatbots for IA Summit and Big Design conferences to reduce the workload on the conference organizers.
Attendees will then learn basic design principles to make their bots beautiful with the help of live demos and interviews Jayneil conducted with award-winning chatbots like Howdy, Poncho, Growbot.
What’s on track for the next Talkabot?
Our next event is Wednesday, October 18, 2017 starting at 6pm.
This month's speakers:
- dakota smith, Howdy AI — When you are getting started, choosing the correct hosting platform for running your bot will shape how you write your code, how you debug your bot, and what your bot can do. Dakota Smith will survey the state-of-the-art bot development offerings and describe the tricks & tradeoffs of each.
- Seth Louey, BotList — Seth is the CEO and Co-Founder of BotList.co, and will be discussing the current state of Chatbots and what the future has in store for them
- Jonathan Doklovic, Atlassian — Stride is poised to be the next big platform for the conversational workplace, Jonathan will be on hand to discuss developing for the platform and answer developer questions about the new opportunities for bots.
We will be streaming the event live on Zoom, details for the event will be posted on our twitter channel.
Want to attend? RSVP now!
Thanks to our Sponsors!
Many thanks to our community partners and sponsors!
- Howdy — http://howdy.ai/
- Voxable — http://voxable.io/
- Message.io — https://message.io/
- Condé Nast — http://condenast.com/austin/
- Cisco Spark — https://ciscospark.com/
Get involved!
Talkabot is organized by Howdy, the team behind Botkit and Botkit Studio in Austin, Tx, the worldwide home of bots!
Any questions? Want to present at a future meetup? Interested in being a sponsor? Contact us at info@talkabot.ai.
We’d love to hear from you!
