Chatbots round-up #4: the winners of the 1st Chatbots Awards in our industry
A few days ago, our friends at ChatBottle announced the winners of the first chatbots awards in our industry, selected by both bot experts and the design+tech community. Let’s take a look at the winners.
From January 9 to January 18 people from 65 countries voted 5,646 times to select the best chatbots in each of these categories: Travel, Productivity, Social, Commerce, Entertainment, and News.
But before we announce the winners…
How the Chatbot Awards idea came about
2016, the first “Year of the Bot”, is over. There are now more than 1000 chatbots built for Facebook Messenger, Slack, Skype, Kik, Telegram and other platforms.
Lots of very talented designers, developers, writers and strategists have been putting a lot of energy into building great conversational experiences for their users.
At the end of the year, Alexander Gamanyuk had the idea of creating an awards to celebrate the best-in-class bots in our industry and all the hard work these professionals have been doing. Earlier in 2016, Alex had founded ChatBottle, a pretty comprehensive repository of bots, with thousands of chatbots organized by category and by channel in which they are available — so we had all the data needed to support the awards.
Alex then pitched the idea to myself and Stefan Kojouharov (editor of ChatbotsLife), and we gave him some feedback on how to organize, run and promote the Awards.
“Right in the middle of December 2016 we came up with an idea of the 1st ChatBottle Awards. But after pitching the idea to our friends we decided to postpone the launch. Thanks Stefan Kojouharov and Fabricio Teixeira for the advice. It was Christmas time and at that moment many people already left their offices and started celebrating the holidays.”
That was it. On January 9th, the 1st ChatBottle Awards was launched, with a pretty solid list of experts helping select the best chatbots in our industry.
A team of bot experts selecting the finalists
To make sure all angles were being considered, we decided to ask industry experts for the best bot experiences they had seen in 2016. We received almost 100 bot submissions for the following categories: Travel, Productivity, Social, Entertainment, E-commerce, and News.
Here is the list of bot experts who voted for the shortlist— a great variety of names, from different backgrounds and different sides of our industry:
- Spencer Yang, CEO at KeyReply
- Peter M Buch, CEO at Swell
- YuHsuan Chao, co-founder at Botimize
- Andrei Sabanskiy, from BotMakers.net
- Stefan Kojouharov, founder and editor at ChatbotsLife
- Joe Toscano, experience designer at R/GA
- Pratik Jain, co-founder at Morph.ai
- Jakob Reiter, co-founder at The Ventury
- Jin (Hitoshi) Tanaka, founder and CEO at Xpresso
- Ekim Nazım Kaya, author of The Bot Book
- Emanuele Capparelli, founder at Bot Company
- Ricardo Blumer Grobel, creator of BotsBrasil
- David Pichsenmeister, co-founder of Orat_io
- Matt Burns, vice-president of growth at Zoom
- Thomas Schulz, founder at Botscamp
- Sandeep Chivukula, co-founder at GetBotMetrics
- Greg Leuch, head of product at Poncho
Interesting facts about the chatbots shortlisted by the bot experts:
- 4 experts had trouble recommending entertainment bots — maybe a sign that there’s still room for innovation in that space;
- Only 1 of the bots mentioned by the experts didn’t have English as its native language (chatshopper);
- Half of the bots nominated support more than one platform (e.g. Facebook and Slack) simultaneously;
- 6 out of the almost 100 nominations sent by the bot experts mentioned bots they were affiliated to — which we decided not to count as a vote;
Recommended reading:
More than 5,000 votes from 65 countries
From January 9 to January 18 people from 65 countries voted 5,646 times to select the best chatbots in each category. Here’s a breakdown of votes from some of the countries who engaged the most:
- USA — 544
- Germany — 140
- Austria — 207
- Brazil — 27
- Ukraine — 32
- Japan — 159
- India — 905
- Canada — 116
- Israel — 266
- UK — 67
The most active cities voting for the Awards: San Francisco, Toronto, New York, Berlin, Vienna, Tel Aviv, New Delhi, Bengaluru, and Tokyo.
And the winner is…
The best News bot: TechCrunch
The TechCrunch chatbot for Messenger helps you stay on top of topics and stories you care about. You can subscribe to different tags, authors or sections of the site, and the bot will send news articles from TechCrunch about the things you are interested in the most.
You can also ask the bot open-ended questions related to Technology and it will promptly give you an answer.
In terms of mechanics, the TechCrunch bot has a pretty straightforward content distribution conversational flow, which can mean two things (probably both):
- That this is exactly what people expect from news bots today, and that adding new functionality just for the sake of it might not make it more relevant to readers;
- That there is a lot of opportunity for making news bots smarter in the future – especially with the addition of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and other technologies that will make them more responsive and relevant to users.
The best Travel bot: Instalocate
by Ankur Jain and Pallavi Singh
Instalocate is a chatbot for Facebook Messenger that gives you a worry-free travel experience. Just enter your flight number and it will get you real-time information about your flight. It will also provide contextual information like security wait time, delay alerts, web check-in, baggage allowance, etc.
It also keeps your family informed while you are in mid air, and it helps you get a cab as soon as the flight lands. If your flight was delayed, it even notifies you when you are eligible for compensation and automatically files that for you.
The best Entertainment bot: BFF Trump
by Claudia Cukrov and Kevin Skobac
BFF Trump bot was created by creative agency SS+K and Dexter to bring attention to the hateful rhetoric of Donald Trump — with the goal of engaging people to vote their values in the 2016 election.
It seems the bot was not the only one to win an election…
The best Productivity bot: Meekan
by Matty Mariansky, Eyal Yavor and Lior Yavor
Meekan for Slack is a cross-vendor calendar scheduling platform, enabling you to connect with everyone, on any calendar, hassle-free. Meekan understands human-readable requests such as “Meekan, schedule a team meeting tomorrow afternoon, and find us a room”, or "Meekan, we want to have dinner next Monday”.
Great to see a bot that is simply trying to solve a big pain point for its users, in a very natural and seamless way.
The best Social bot: Foxsy
Foxsy is your personal matchmaking chatbot for Facebook Messenger that allows finding beautiful and meaningful connections with the right person. “Foxsy, find me the love of my life”.
The best E-Commernce bot: chatShopper
by Antonia Ermacora and Matthias Nannt
ChatShopper was one of the first fashion-shopping chatbots on Facebook Messenger. The chatbot asks users about their fashion taste and replies back with product suggestions.
The project started on April 2015 with a human-backed service but the team soon we learnt that humans don’t scale. On December the first chatbot was built. Half a year ago the chatShopper team put lots of efforts into training its NLP engine — now the bot understands up to 80% of users’ queries.
According to the bot creators, the next big steps are scaling the service, enabling image recognition and voice support.
Editors’ Choice: Swelly
by Peter Buchroithner, Philipp Holly, Barbara Macinkovic
Swelly is a social network for making decisions with your friends. Vote for cool stuff and help other people with their daily decisions. A swell contains a question and 2 options. A or B? This or That? High Heels or Sneakers? Hot or Not?
Swelly is available for Facebook Messenger, Line, Telegram and Kik. Peter M. Buch recently reported 1.8M registered users on Swelly.
