
Show HN: Chatbots made easy – Build, train, and deploy bots - bestkao
https://motion.ai
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Jaruzel
This whole 'bot renaissance makes me think that somewhere 1000s of old IRC
Channel admins are raising their hands in despair, and quickly shuffling
through countless CD-Rs of old TCL and Perl code to see if they have something
worth re-releasing.

Granted, the natural language stuff is way better than it was, but the current
bot platforms that are springing up everywhere are nothing more than a
language parser and an empty ruleset DB that you as the customer have to spend
endless hours populating.

It seems a very unfinished solution right now; We're going to see a flood of
sub-par bots* on the market that are going to cause the end users to disengage
within months.

(*I'm sure motion.ai's bots are very good, and I am not singling them out
here, just commenting on the whole bot thing in general)

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elorant
My main concern is that this whole situation will not include only chat bots
but it will also trigger a demand for crawling bots which could put a lot of
stress on web sites. Then sites could adopt aggressive captcha schemes which
will hammer usability and make the life of legitimate crawlers a lot more
difficult. It’s a lose-lose situation , until the industry comes into its
senses and realize this whole thing is a fad.

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fizzbatter
One solution to this could simply be improving our ability to handle traffic.
Bots aren't doing anything bad (under normal condition), they just represent a
portion of your view traffic that you don't inherently want. An aggressive
user, of sorts.

With that said, we have more cycles these days, better web servers, and
inherently more traffic capacity than we did 10 years ago.

I have a feeling bot traffic will grow faster than our traffic-handling-tech,
but regardless, i think this is just going to be the new standard. Especially
since bot traffic could represent UX requirements for potential users.

Quite an interesting future we have though.

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King-Aaron
I feel like it's the early 2000's all over again with chat bots suddenly
becoming a big thing again.

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ne0phyte
Would be nice if there were a couple of example bots that you could try
talking to/see some info about before creating an account.

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davidnels
David from Motion AI here. Definitely agree! We are building out our Bot Store
which will be a great way to sample a wide range of bots.

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orky56
Should be on the home page, perhaps even above the fold already asking you a
question with a side-by-side of the flowchart components being
activated/highlighted.

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davidnels
That's a super good UI suggestion, thanks. We just launched our public beta
about 6 hours ago and have been thrilled with the response and very unique
bots being created (particularly when people leverage IFTTT and Zapier too)
... we'll definitely be surfacing as many cool uses as possible ASAP :)

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fizzbatter
From an NLP standpoint, what is the comparison between this and other NLP
products? Namely WitAi, etc?

I'm writing a bot framework (code, not web service), and trying to generalize
the process so the the developer can switch between different NLP providers
with ease (to avoid lockin.. as much as possible atleast).

So, comparing to Witai atlast, is your NLP better? Is it more flexible
somehow? etc, thoughts?

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davidnels
Our value-add here would be providing the pipelines for one-click deployment
(SMS, Facebook, Slack etc) and structuring of conversation flow, in addition
to things like post-deployment analytics and insights on how users are talking
to your bot. In terms of NLP, we actually take an agnostic approach to whether
users want to use Wit.ai (or api.ai etc) in conjunction with our service, or
use our NLP offerings. Thanks for the question!

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flexie
Do the bots speak English only or can users train them easily to talk with
customers in other languages?

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rmelly
Most of what I've seen is in English but there are some second-level services
popping up that promise an API for chatbot translation, e.g. Cyrano
([http://cyrano.unbabel.com/](http://cyrano.unbabel.com/)).

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retrodict
Sounds like a good addition to
[http://wtfismybot.tech/](http://wtfismybot.tech/)

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id122015
I remember the time when kids considered bots cool, and I had no idea about
programming then, nor did I understand how bots were usefull..

But the problem is I dont understand not even today who would be interested to
interact with a bot? And how is this service better than employing a
programmer ? Some examples would be useful.

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Gustomaximus
Super cool concept to make this more accessible. Has anyone deployed this
platform is a customer service enviroment? And if so how'd it go?

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davidnels
The platform is only hours old in terms of public availability, but here's a
pretty cool customer service demo bot that scans a knowledgebase first, but
can create a helpdesk ticket if human assistance is required:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9IMsJW4ca0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9IMsJW4ca0)

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IshKebab
Maybe I'm missing something, but can't a normal website do all that?

Or is the idea that you can feed message-only channels like email and Facebook
messanger to it? But then you could just say "We don't really provide email
support; see our website here: ..."

Kind of feels like using telephone menus when you don't have to.

(Nothing against your platform though - it looks very well done!)

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dreamdu5t
Bots are broken as a platform. No advertising, no payments system, developers
have to pay for hosting, there's no discovery mechanism because the messengers
don't have bot stores... Why would developers be interested?

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dudemonkey
Replace "bots" with "internet" and this could have been a quote lifted from a
circa-1995 Microsoft strategy meeting

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dexwiz
Bots are closer to a CLI than a GUI, that is the core issue with discovery.

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cmdrfred
I don't understand the discovery comment. I don't discover Bob the copier
salesman. I decide I need a copier, search for copier retailers and then give
Bob a call. Won't bots work the same way?

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dexwiz
You don't have to discover how to call Bob, which is analogous to finding the
bot. But you may need to discover what jargon to use with Bob to make sure you
get what you want.

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berntb
I got an idea the last time I saw this discussed, which probably will make
some present HN people rich:

Bots which follow your own conversations/emails/etc, read the comments from
other people -- and in another window suggest jokes, information, links etc
based on parsed language. Just click to add the suggested answer.

You could install modules to see suggestions from e.g. a stand up comedian,
some experts for different topics or just the wikipedia pages for all
mentioned non-trivial concepts, etc.

A bot could e.g. help with fixing grammar errors.

Everyone can be their own Woody Allen -- or get help to write as a depressive
persona. Or as a Romeo. :-)

