@mahringer_a Can you please get a bit into detail about the technologies you have used so far? And what are your future plans, especially in terms of NLP?
@smalzner@mahringer_a
hi Stefan,
having jumped on the node.js train a while ago, we used an npm package to provide the webhook (simply called “messenger-bot”). Although Facebook’s docs for the API were still brand new, integration with it was quite pain-free (except for a few nasty typos in the specifications :)). The Record Bird bot itself is built as a micro-service that uses a graph to decide how to respond to queries. A little bit of tree-search logic tracks individual users as they move through the graph and generates replies based on that information.
NLP/NLA is obviously a huge topic for us, and we plan to use wit.ai or a similar service for basic semantic analysis, plus a bit of custom parsing logic because there are just so many different artist names / genre-name renditions out there. Wit.ai looks pretty promising as it has a very usable interface and seems really focussed on conversational analysis. Hope this helps!
@quadres Not at all, we'll launch our iOS app this summer! :) We believe that bots and apps simply fulfil a different purpose: Bots help users to easily experiment with new products. They make a first contact painless. Also, they can be very helpful to deliver short pieces of information to a user within a highly relevant environment. (Companies now have a touchpoint with users which was previously strictly limited to friends, family and colleagues).
Native apps is still where the deep engagement takes place. I highly doubt that bots will replace apps in the future - nor should they. The interface and engagement is likely to limited - generic and not customised - to fully support each experience. We do believe though, that bots can be the next big thing in any product’s user acquisition cycle.
Lastly, we didn't involve our users when making the decision to develop a bot. The topics is probably still too new, few people - apart from the PH community - currently grasp the full potential of this opportunity. Nevertheless, we involved various different users in the development of the bot experience which was crucial for its development.
@patprokesch Compared to Spotify or Apple Music, Record Bird offers an information advantage which triggers valuable discourse amongst the target audience. Record Bird tells you about a new release before it actually happens. The digital music age shows very clearly, that the time leading up to a release - and the conversations prompted in that period - are as vital and crucial to a successful release as the music itself. This opportunity to communicate release information early, engage fans and influencers and build momentum towards the release day, clearly differentiates us from release day notifications by any streaming service.
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@mahringer_a great, thanks this makes it more clear. love that you guys are so close to the artists. I'm a user already <><
I could upvote for the icon alone, but I really like the bot as well :). It's nice that it draws you in to your main website.
Wondering, are there any plans on the roadmap to include when there are updates on upcoming albums from artists, aside from official release date announcements? I need a source to filter out all other music news (like what you'd see from Pitchfork), and only get new album tidbits when they come up in the press.
@leftearpod haha glad you like the "Disco-Icon"! :) Regarding your question, most definitely - so excited that you describe your personal need for this: We've been talking extensively about a "rumor-sectin" (working title) where we can aggregate news on artists from various news sources and give you a simple overview of their release plans/updates, long before a final date is announced. On top, we'll dive into semantic speech analysis and pattern analysis of social media postings, in order to calculate the likelihood of a forthcoming release (e.g. keywords, frequency of tweets increase etc...), which will then feed back into the "rumor section". What do you think?
@mahringer_a@recordbird_com cool, thanks for the early look. i have some things to talk about with it, if you want...want to email? im at jake at andchill dot io
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I hadn't heard of Record Bird until now, really enjoyed the bot and now logging into the website! Where have you been my whole life?
@anthony_abitbol glad to hear it, we're here now buddy! IOS app coming this summer, hang tight! If you have any critical feedback, let me know: andreas@recordbird.com 🤘🏻
The 🐦 Record Bird team got one of the first music related chat bots approved on the Facebook Messenger platform. You can ask it about new releases or announcements as well as query for specific artists.
I wonder which 🎨 ux & interaction patterns will emerge over time and what other bot use cases we'll see. Exciting times.
@__tosh Thanks for hunting and introducing our chatbot to the community here on Product Hunt today. We believe bots can offer a playful way for users to interact with our product with the smallest friction possible. Users remain in the well known environment of their messaging app and little to no effort is required to evaluate the potential of a new product or getting to a specific information super quickly. I'm here with our CTO @graf_arnold today to answer any questions you might have! Let's do this! :) Try our bot: http://m.me/recordbird
How do you see other messenger platforms compared to Facebook Messenger? Any plans to support more of them? What do you think how the space will evolve going fwd?
@__tosh We’ve also developed a chatbot for Kik. You can give it a try here: http://bots.kik.com/#/recordbird
For our use case, Facebook definitely offers the best UI at the moment. As the CTA Buttons are attached to the message, the user can click on buttons or type without switching keyboards (as is the case with Kik). The biggest advantage of Kik is that it offers a dedicated "BotShop", which makes the discovery for users rather easy, therefore generates a constant inbound of traffic. From what we know, Facebook and Telegram don't plan to launch anything similar at the moment.
The real potential lies in the personalisation of bots - personalisation in the most literal sense of the world: people dislike talking to robots or programs as much as they dislike having a conversation with an answering machine. We want to engage with people and the best alternative to a real dialogue could be a human like conversation with a program. So we work towards making your bot experience with Record Bird more personal and human, both in terms of personalising the content we show you (e.g. based on your Facebook Likes) but also in terms of offering you more natural ways to engage with the chatbot.
The best bots will be able to process and interpret input beyond the command line. For now, we’ll focus on optimising the current experience for our bots on Facebook and Kik. We want to learn how people currently engage with them and optimise based on these insights.
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