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Making SUSI.AI reach more users through messenger bots

SUSI.AI learns from the queries asked to it by the users. More are the number of queries asked, the better is the learning by SUSI.AI. More are the number of users involved with SUSI.AI, better is the amount of content available to SUSI to learn from. Now, the challenge in front of us is to indulge more users with SUSI.AI. In this blog post, SUSI Tweetbot and SUSI FBbot are used as examples to show how we increase our user base through messenger bots.

Twitter:

Twitter has a 328 million user base according to this article’s data. Integration of SUSI.AI to just Twitter makes it available to around 300 million users. Even if some percentage of these users start using SUSI.AI, increase in the user base of SUSI.AI could be exponential. Increasing the user base is advantageous as it provides with more training data for SUSI.AI to learn from.

Sharing by public tweet:

Integrating to it is just the first step towards increasing SUSI.AI’s user base. Next step is to reach the users and indulge them into chatting with SUSI.AI.

Suppose a user asked something to SUSI.AI and really liked the reply from it. He/she wants to share it with his/her followers. This can prove to be a golden opportunity for us, to increase the reach of SUSI.AI. This way we can indulge their friends to try SUSI.AI and have an amazing time with it.

It becomes clear that sharing messages is an indispensable feature and can help us a lot. Twitter doesn’t provide sharing with friends through direct messages but with a feature much better than it. We can share that message as a public tweet and cover more users including the followers of the user.

 

To show this button we use Call to action support by twitter:

"message_data": {
          "text": txt,
          "ctas": [{
                      "type": "web_url",
                      "label": "Share with your followers",
                      "url": ""
          }]
}

The url key in the above code must have a value that redirects to a U.I. that allows to publicly tweet this reply by SUSI.AI.

Using this “https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=” as the url value shows a new page with an empty tweet message, as the text query in the url has no value. We set the text field with a value such that we end up like this:

and after tweeting it:

Sending a direct message link with the tweet:

Twitter provides with a lot of features when sending direct messages. Shifting a user from tweets to direct messages is beneficial in a way that we can efficiently tell the user about the capabilities of SUSI.AI and show important links to him/her like of its repository, web chat client etc.

When a user tweets to the SUSI.AI page with a query, we reply with a tweet back to the user. Along with that, we provide a link to privately message SUSI.AI account if the user wants to.

This way if user ends up visiting SUSI.AI in a chat window:

To achieve this in SUSI Tweetbot, Twitter provides with a direct message url. This url – https://twitter.com/messages/compose?recipient_id= redirects us to the chat window of the account having that recipient id, passed as a query string. In our case the url turns out to be – https://twitter.com/messages/compose?recipient_id=871446601000202244 as “871446601000202244” is the recipient id of @SusiAI1 account on twitter.

If we send this url as a text in our “tweet back” to the user, Twitter beautifully shows it as a clickable button with the label as “send a private message” as shown above.

Hence we call the tweet function like this:

tweetIt('@' + from + ' ' + message + date +"\nhttps://twitter.com/messages/compose?recipient_id=871446601000202244");

Facebook:

As we all know Facebook is the giant of social networking sites. Integrating SUSI.AI to Facebook is beneficial for us.

Unlike Twitter, in Facebook we can share messages with other friends through direct messaging to them. The last topic of this blog post walks you through on adding sharing feature in SUSI FBbot:

We also take advantage from the SUSI FBbot to make SUSI.AI better. We can direct the users using SUSI messenger bots to SUSI.AI repository and show them all the required information on how to contribute to the project.

The best way to do this is by showing a “How to contribute” button when the user clicks on “Get started” in the messenger bot.

This blog post will help you showing buttons along with the replies (by SUSI.AI).

When the user clicks this button, we send two messages back to the user as shown:

This way through bots, we have somehow got the user to visit SUSI.AI repository and contribute to it or indulge him/her in the discussion, through our Gitter channel on what can be the next steps in improving SUSI.AI.

Resources:

  1. Link Ads to Messenger, Enhanced Mobile Websites, Payments and More by Seth Rosenberg from Facebook developers blog.
  2. Drive discovery of bots and other customer experiences in direct messages by  Travis Lull from Twitter blog.

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