Building AI-powered chatbot products: tips & tricks

Media hype in chat bots reached peak levels this year, driving developers to build bots with near cult-like enthusiasm. Bots are being developed at an unprecedented rate, and a wide variety of vendors and startups are jumping on the bots bandwagon. Analysts believe that chat bots hold great potential for transforming how organizations interact with customers and employees - they can deliver conversation-like experience which is personal, rich, and simple, while at the same time it does not force the user out of their natural environment - instant messengers.

However, there are still challenges that need to be addressed for chat bots to fulfill the promise of true conversational interfaces. The artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning components associated with them, have been at the crux of attention. The question is, how far are they from being truly "smart"?

Also, what other obstacles do startups and companies need to overcome in order to unleash the potential of this emerging market? What opportunities lie ahead and what are the ones we can benefit from today? How can we use chat bots and chat bot technology to build great products? Boyan Benev (Gain.im) and Momchil Elenkov (Viber) will try to shed some light into these questions. They will also showcase some real life examples of already implemented bots and will talk about the strategies which their companies use to untap this market trend.

Boyan Benev is the founder of Gain.im - a chat bot which creates marketplaces in instant messangers and allows anyone to trade in a simple way. Boyan has more than fifteen years of product and marketing experience of successful (and several unsuccessful) businesses ranging from real estate to media and IT. Some of his previous roles include: acting as the CMO of big data analytics startup, MammothDB, hosting television and radio shows focusing on innovation and education topics, as well as authoring three books.

Momchil Elenkov - Global Telecom partnerships manager at Viber - is responsible for the Viber strategic commercial partnerships with mobile operators on group level as well as in various markets worldwide. His fields of action also include tech-projects related to AI, Chat-bots, B2B and B2C- communication between corporations and end-users via the Viber-ecosystem. Momchil has a background in two of the leading telecoms in Bulgaria where he managed the mobile products and services and CRM strategies and activities.