Creative Technology Monthly: Chatbots
Issue 01: Bots — November 2016
Welcome to Creative Technology monthly, this is the first issue of what we hope will be a long-running series here at TMW. It will cover topics ranging from design to development; artificial intelligence to hardware hacking; and much more.
Chatbots 🤖
This month has been dominated, for the most part, by chatbots. Everyone seems to want one, and brands are no exception. At TMW, we have been investigating the various different types of bots and platforms, and have been creating some prototypes for our clients.
In our research, we have come across many different examples. Some were good, some were n0t-so-good, but all had something to offer. Below are some examples that caught my eye:
- Channel 4’s TV programme, Humans created an excellent bot recently to publicise their second season. It puts you into the heart of the story with one. Try it out here (external site).
- Poncho weather (external site) 🌦 has native smartphone apps, but it also has a brilliant Facebook Messenger bot. The copywriting is excellent and really enhances the experience for would normally be a simple utility.
- HealthTap (external site) 🚑 is a Facebook Messenger bot that provides fast access to health care
- If you need help getting a Visa for the 🇺🇸 United States, Visabot (external site) will be able to help you. It is the first immigration robot powered by artificial intelligence.
Create your own bot
There are many bot development platforms, we have evaluated some and these are our recommendations:
Chatfuel.com (external site) — Create a bot without any code
Chatfuel provides basic AI and hooks to many 3rd party services so you can actually create a fairly robust Facebook Messenger or Telegram bot with relative ease. It is excellent for simple bots or prototyping but I think that for complex bots where context is needed, other solutions like wit.ai (external site) or Gupshup (external site) may be better.
API.ai (external site) — Conversational User Experience Platform
If you need a little more power, customisation and natural language from your bot, API.ai is the one to go for. It provides both voice and text API’s and has including a huge library of topics to allow your bot to be taught and respond naturally in most situations.
Special mention goes to wit.ai (external site), Gupshup (external site) and init.ai (external site) for more developer-focused bot creation.
You can find more bots at Botlist (external site) or at botpages.com (external site) and, for more information, Chatbot magazine (external site) is invaluable for bot news and trends. Bot Stash (external site) is also a great resource for all things bot-related.
🔥 Showcase
- Quick, draw! by Google — This is a game built with machine learning. You draw, and a neural network tries to guess what you’re drawing. You can find more A.I experiments here (external site).
- Adult Swim Singles (external site) created in partnership with Active Theory (external site). Check out their other work, pretty much everything they do is incredible.
- Finding Home (external site) — an amazing experience set to music from one of my favourite artists, Tycho (external site).
- Jenny Johannesson (external site) — Digital Designer portfolio made by Ari Benoist (external site) (follow Ari, he links to many cool sites on his Twitter feed 👍 )
- The Experimental layout lab of Jen Simmons (external site) — There are many useful techniques using cutting-edge CSS here — definitely worth a look!
- Useful Codepens for Front-end development (external site): A large CodePen collection collated by Sarah Drasner (external site) featuring techniques that may prove useful in everyday front-end dev.
📖 Reading / Link list
- An Event Apart archive (external site) — This is gold. It contains links and slides from all ‘An Event Apart’ events.
- 10 principles for smooth web animations (external site) — The complete guide to getting 60fps animations with CSS with some very useful tips.
- Introduction to Machine Learning for Developers (external site) by Stephanie Kim at Algorithmia
- Is the web VR ready? (external site) 😎 is a very useful status site for VR on the web.
- Dos and don’ts on designing for accessibility (external site).
- Three ways of understanding Promises (external site) by Dr. Axel Rauschmayer (external site)
- Choice (external site) is another thoughtful article by Jeremy Keith (external site) about progressive enhancement in today’s modern web
- A rant of sorts (external site) by Alex Russell about the state of web development/javascript today. Especially pertinent if you write single-page web apps.
⚒ Code
- npms (external site) isn’t a library but if you need to search for open-source code on npm, this is the site to do it. It is far faster and the results are more accurate. You can also use unpkg.com (external site) for demo/prototyping purposes. You can link directly to an npm package’s script. Also, ntl (external site) is a really useful package if you are running lots of npm run scripts.
- Reframe.js (external site) 📽 is a javascript plugin that makes elements scale at a fixed ratio. Very useful for making Youtube/Vimeo embeds responsive.
- dont-go (external site) is a small client-side library with zero dependencies to change the title and/or favicon of the page when it is inactive. 😌
- Awesome Micro npm Packages (external site) is a curated list of small, focused Node.js modules.
- Awesome Sass (external site) 🎨 is a curated list of awesome Sass and SCSS frameworks, libraries, style guides, articles, and resources.
- Google’s Mobile-First Indexing Approach (external site) — Google’s algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content.
🖥 Apps
- Franz (external site) is a free messaging app that supports Slack, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Skype and many more.
- Alfred (external site) is a Mac productivity app that replaces Spotlight search and adds many more features. 3rd party plugins, known as workflows can also be installed to extend the app.
- Flux (external site) makes the colour of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.
🍔 Tech Team Activity
🗣 Ciaran Park, Denzil Brade, JP and myself all attended #FFconf (external site) recently, it was a brilliant few days with many inspiring talks. Watch this space for a full write-up.
🗣 In a recent #brunch&learn™ JP spoke about Redux Observables, he will be writing a piece about it soon.
🏐 I have been hard at work on the next version of Kickoff, version 8 of our front-end framework. If you’re interested in keeping up-to-date, please follow development in the v8 branch on the Github repo (external site). The docs are also being improved, see the WIP here (external site).
👋
If you have any comments or feedback, please let us know. If you have any suggestions for next month’s issue. Please send a tweet to @TMWInteractive (external site).