This is such an interesting pivot! From restaurant recommendations from an AI to a general purpose "platform of bots"...!
I've met Luka's CEO, @ekuyda, and she's super smart. This is a great expansion of the original effort and rather than just providing a platform for other people's bots, Luka now has an army of assistants that can evolve independently, unlocking parallel bot-evolution, and targeted question-response by users. Now you can invite the right bot in a given category to a conversation you're having, instead of relying one universal bot that wouldn't be domain-specific, and therefore potentially prone to confusion.
Congrats to the team — this is an existing launch, with new funding to help them build this out!
@chrismessina Thank you, Chris! Happy to answer any questions. Here is some more info about Luka 2.0 - https://goo.gl/5uCmC6. We are not only opening up Luka and his AI friends to consumers, but also inviting developers to join us building the best messaging experience with bots. Talk to Luka! <3
@ekuyda@chrismessina thanks Chris for sharing, Eugenia congrats on opening up Luka. Looking forward to building bots 😄
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Good news everyone! Can you please give some details, i.e. do you plan to compete with "bot stores" from Facebook, Kik, Microsoft etc., or you going to integrate with them somehow? Thanks
@which_might We'll see what F8 will bring us, of course, - but the idea is to integrate with everyone we can, while working on getting the best experience of messaging with AI right
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Hey @ekuyda, it's refreshing to see a bot be 'entertaining' and part of my casual daily messaging (for once in my life). How do you think Luka compares to personal assistants (like assist.ai) or shopping apps like (operator) ? Will you be adding those features soon?
@emmie we are trying to get the user the best experience that combines messaging and AI - the bots themselves can be assistants or shopping consultants or just a simple weather bot. The main challenge is to combine them all in a seamless user experience. And we will definitely be adding shopping and assistant tasks very soon :)
I guess I must be part of the late adopters for this kind of products, but I really don't see how these bots could become and, more importantly, stay a thing. Sure, the technology is great, and it is cool to make a reservation by chatting with a bot. But -- and this is a genuine question, I just might be missing something, and I'd love to hear your point of view -- how is it an improvement over pressing a button ?
@thomgroutars you are absolutely right - it's still early and many bots out there are still gimmicks. But we've been seeing a lot of change here since we started almost 3 years ago - and I think a lot of awesome functionality that is purely chat-first is yet to be developed. Imagine you could tell a bot "I want to go out tonight" and a bot would text your friends, book a table and get back to you with a perfect evening plan? This is something that is very natural to do in a conversation. And that's just one of the examples. We'll be adding a lot of that to Luka, today's is a very early sneak peek into what we're up to.
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I think my expectations must still be too high. "How do I get to Sainte Marthe in Paris?" and I keep being asked to pose a question.
@companytrends Thank you, Sam, for your feedback. Our main focus right now is on creating great experiences for specific verticals - like food, for example. We are not trying to create a bot that would answer absolutely any question as our first step, because it's just not possible at this stage of technology. Creating a gimmick that can replicate Google Maps functionality doesn't make sense unless there is a lot of traction created by use cases that are not yet covered by existing products or could be done significantly better and/or work differently in a chat/group chat. However, we will definitely be able to answer those specific questions soon :)
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This is on the leading edge of where messaging is heading (welcome to our AI overlords). Excited to see this get some traction.
Luka has shown a clear expertise in bots, they've been doing this for far longer than other players in the market. Looking forward to seeing luka win over with their bots in the near future.
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