Drift Developer Platform - Build bots for marketing & sales

This is a really exciting addition to the Drift product. Very excited to see what can be built to extend on site conversations.

Give it a go. The sky is the limit!

Pros:

The API is easy to use, the documentation is very comprehensive and the team is great.

Cons:

Not that I can think of

Awesome work to the Drift team that have been absolutely awesome to work with, they've made building on top of their API super easy and we're looking forward to launching our FAQ & Knowledge Base automation service imminently. Drift itself is a conversational marketing tool that fits the modern marketing stack, Drift share the same vision as Hu:toma in that filling out forms and collecting emails for followup is out of date and doesn't work. Teams of any size can't waste time speaking to leads that will never convert and that's where Drift and Hu:toma can work their magic. Pre-qualifying leads, providing answers to FAQs in real time, and routing the best leads to the right Sales rep. Conversation, not forms! Thanks @anguyenrex @emilymias and the rest of the team! To everyone else ping me if you're interested in trying out our integration. https://get.hutoma.ai/integratio...

Congrats @dcancel and team! Would love to explore building a 2-way Drift<-->Zendesk integration. Poking around the docs now.

I'm really excited to see what we can build with this. I have a bunch of ideas already, and I think it'll change the way we handle customer support & sales. Both internally, and for our users.

Pros:

Very easy to get started with, straightforward APIs

Cons:

More detailed developer docs would be 💯

We integrate with many communication platforms, and most of their APIs have at least one of the following problems:

- wonky API structure around conversation lifecycle

- being unprepared for developer use cases and slow to iterate

We had the chance to work with the Drift team during the beta, and I can say they've threaded both these needles. The API is simple to work with, and the team is actively adapting to community requests. If you're in this space, worth joining the conversation!

Pros:

Simple, well considered API backed by very responsive team.

Cons:

Features and docs evolving quickly, so worth regular review.

Working with Drift has been a breeze, we've had all the support necessary day & night via a shared Slack workspace to get us up and running.

Excited to be launching Hu:toma's integration https://get.hutoma.ai/integratio... imminently so you guys watch FAQs answered on autopilot and spend more time closing better qualified leads.

Pros:

Really simple API, good docs, and lots of support from the Drift team!

Cons:

Early stages - the platform will only grow from here

This is HUGE!

Hate to be a party pooper but… I think this “bot/assistant” market is just a sitting duck waiting to be seized by any of the large cloud platforms who are making huge investments in AI and machine learning for a broad spectrum of uses and will acquihire any other AI company that makes any significant advance in the field. Everything else is just trying to emulate a human with software that won’t event pass the Turing test, which usually only gets the actual humans, non techies, on the other side of the screen to become frustrated and then infuriated thus backfiring. Just ask yourself how many people you know actually use either Siri or Google Assistant on a regular basis, it’s highly probable that only the techies you know are the ones using any and even them limit their usage to just the most simplistic requests. Sorry, I have been on the other side and once you get out of the predefined path, you enter into a loop of question/answer that seems you are in session with a incompetent psychoanalyst. That’s my take. And I guess that is also Google’s, Amazon’s and Apple’s since they don’t seem to push chat bots on their online storefronts and I don’t think it has to do with budgetary concerns or constraints.

I am looking to give my serious visitors the capability to call me quickly. Either twilio or other click-to-be-called tool?