Very impressed with the smooth Facebook Messenger connection. It just works, no installation required.
I've never seen a bot working inside Facebook Messenger - is this an official connection, or are they going to shut you down when the word is out? Very interesting!
Can you share more info on this?
@mmariansky can't really say much but I think it's obvious where all this is going. I started Geek Squad as soon as I saw the web in college. I haven't been as excited until now in hopes of using messaging versus voice for customer service.
I find it particularly interesting that this is available across a variety of popular platforms — SMS, Slack, Facebook Messenger, etc... Currently, other products in this space are tied to one (Magic via SMS, M via Messenger, Operator via its own app).
@shanemac — What's the reasoning behind this? Do you see people using Assist differently on each of these different platforms?
@jackdweck We expect this will be the case and we are keeping a close eye on it. Specifically the difference between enterprise and consumer messaging platforms. The other thing is we anticipate the platforms to open up messaging UI and languages at different rates so consumers might prefer better experiences if some of the platforms allow you to better purchase, view content, etc without using links or command line level type interface. Many people prefer design and it is coming.
@jackdweck One of the key reasons (I suspect) for Assist not having their own app, is that app fatigue is a real problem, and the reasons that people are now flocking to building on top of messaging is because it lets them go to where their users (or potential users) are instead of getting the users to have to come to them. Accordingly it makes sense to support multiple platforms. Fast forward to next year and I think multi platform support will be table stakes.
(Not taking anything away from Assist, it looks very cool, and I think Magic et al should be watching their back)
@tonylucas all true. An additional reason for no app is we really tried to use the harsh constraint of SMS to force us to see what we could do without the luxury of device or OS APIs. A concern is: will there be too many messaging platforms to make bots cross-compatible?
@shanemac@jackdweck Another great example of the shifting landscape in product interfaces; users want more conversational products and until apps / software becomes adaptive, messaging platforms such as SMS, M and Slack are going to become more popular as the base of new apps. Do you guys have any concerns that people might stop using SMS or messaging in the near-term, in the same way people abandon other apps?
@_pulkitagrawal@jackdweck SMS is still ultimately controlled by the carriers, so nothing would make us happier to have a better, more capable universal platform. Are we worried that FB or Apple will run this show themselves? If I've learned anything in tech, it's that there's always room for a ton of players when the field is this wide open.
I'm actually more worried that developers/companies will have to code their bot for each large messaging platform. This works against the dream in the first place: less work than an app.
This is so cool. Not sure if you guys can answer this yet publicly, but I'll throw the question out: what type of AI are you using? Did you build your own using deep learning algos , or is this a machine learning/Watson type set-up, or are you just licensing some other AI? How much of the guts can you tell us about?
@tuckermax As bots become more and more common, machine learning and technologies like recurrent neural nets will be the key to expanding capability through messaging and text interfaces. There is a lot of very new open source code being released by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and others. This is one of the keys how we plan to improve @Assist.
I also think it is no accident that Mark Zuckerberg chose to build his own "Jarvis" for home automation - which will use text and voice control. Think of the message this sends to all Facebook engineers, especially the Messenger and WhatsApp teams.
@tuckermax Thanks brother and thanks for being in my camp for the past year. Much appreciated for all your thoughts and support. I don't care what people say, you ain't too bad of a guy.
I guess I can't use this yet since I'm not in the US (any plans to roll this out in Europe?). But the approach sounds very promising. Just out of curiosity: what are your thoughts on Magic, GoButler, Facebooks's M, Siri (?), etc., in particular in comparison with assist? Also, what's your long-term vision with this?
@wholeearthweb At this early stage, the more services, the better. Magic and M are great for complex, human-powered tasks. We chose to focus solely on non-human API services. Not every business can afford to build an app, and we don't believe people want to download an entire app just to book a haircut appointment. (Assuming they can even know about these apps in the first place". That's where messaging comes in. Now imagine where a non-technical shopkeeper can literally "program" via chat to expose their inventory, appointment scheduling etc. Assist wants to be the easiest place to access all of those new services.
Just installed it. In case you're interested in bugs (I know you realize it's still buggy): I downloaded it on my iPhone for FB messenger, then got redirected to the AppStore, then opened messenger from there and nothing was there. Then went back to browser to your site where I saw a request to open messenger. Then I saw assist in messenger but no instructions on what I do next (played around with it then and got a response, but just as a feedback for user onboarding).
@wholeearthweb as a v1 - it's likely buggy all over the place. we DO have a feedback method built in: WHile in any chat on @assist, on any platform, just begin your feedback with !
That will not interrupt your current session or task. For example: ! FBMessenger has a bad redirect to the App Store...
I wanted to share a story about why I'm so excited about messaging.
It's 2009, and I've been at Best Buy 7 years since selling Geek Squad to them. I'm sitting in a meeting where some PR firm is pitching their next year's projects for Best Buy. The bid? 3 million. As I was oft to do, I'm on twitter - watching pissed off customers tweet one problem after another. I turned to Best Buy's CMO at the time, Barry Judge and said, "What if our PR strategy was to listen to customers?" That's when we took a small piece of that money and built an in-house twitter tool to allow customers to message customer support. It was similar to a custom version of ZenDesk. The vision was to imagine EVERY employee of a company accessible through real-time chat, use the data to predict problems before they occur, and empower employees to help. The most people we were able to get on that system was 5,000 out of 150,000 employees. I left Best Buy in 2012, and sadly there are likely less than 5,000 still using it.
We are excited to try and accelerate 2 things: expose more APIs that allow for customer self-service, like scheduling, pre-ordering, queuing, requests, etc. Further, when you need to talk to a business, that you can do it through a single interface where YOU have a copy of the conversation "for quality purposes".
We all have a long way to go, but I hope you can see what kinds of service could be delivered in the coming months and years.
@rstephens@shanemac congrats on getting this out there - do you anticipate being able to predict pricing on services in an area for services with enough transactions, e.g. "If you need a cheaper but good X, try y service that is similar to the more expensive version you searched?" or will selection be opaque to the user for now?
@grmeyer I think not only could you predict pricing, but more importantly, you could help retain preferences across services. Right now, only Delta knows I prefer a window seat. Only Westin knows my hotel preferences. It gets super-interesting when you aggregate category preferences across user populations by geography, weather, etc.
This is rad. I'm already playing with it. One complaint though is that you deeplink me to apps when I'm requesting a service (uber).
If I need to go to the app anyway from Assist, why not just go there straight? Also, as a nitpick, the redirect to lyft app 404'd (probably cause I didn't have it).
Also, what's been your experience building the bot on Telegram vs FB Messenger?
@preetnation Telegram is ahead, but lots of bot spam and a very noisy bot store. FB Team appears to be absolutely focused on this opportunity and we can likely expect a lot in 2016/17. I'm wondering....What is WhatsApp going to do?
@preetnation Telegram is technically ahead of most platforms, but there is little to no curation. This makes the bots there riskier. Discovery on the platform is also very noisy. They will need to get ahead of that to avoid driving users away.
@rstephens@preetnation interesting. I played with assist on telegram and I actually had the opposite problem. I literally couldn't figure out how to find any bots until I read through everything on your site. I also wish they'd let you grant location access to the bot on a constant basis instead of transactionally
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