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.
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.
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.
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I'm really getting tired of emails for notifications. I much rather have text messages for everything important... I will definitely be using the crap out of this. 🙌😀
@sachagreif I think you can expect notifications and preferences to become much smarter and learn what you like and don't like. That's what's different this time.
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.
I think you have some troubles on message deliveries. There is some delay (about 1-2 minutes) for each answer.
At this time, it's faster to download a specific app and order with it than using Assist.... which is not your honorable purpose. Keep up the good work.
@charloganem oh my god, there is soooo much to be fixed, improved, debugged, etc. We wanted to get it out there as soon as we could on Product Hunt to show the community partly in hopes of getting feedback as well as interest from engineers who want to work in messaging and machine learning.
Just tried to book a haircut in midtown (23rd /3rd area) and was given a location in Bayonne, NJ (32 minutes away in a car). Not sure it's quite ready for prime time
@walterareid correct. It's ready for the Product Hunt community. There's so much work left to do.
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@rstephens@walterareid Well, based on that response, as proof of concepts go, this is pretty good. Not sure what will differentiate this from the 10 clones that are waiting in the door though.
@walterareid if there are only 10 clones, then I'll be very disappointed with the Product Hunt community. When I started The Geek Squad there were (and still are!) thousands upon thousands of "competitors". Rising tides...
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