The Complete Beginner’s Guide

To Chatbots
Everything you need to know.

What are chatbots? Why are they such a big opportunity? How do
they work? How can I build one? How can I meet other people
interested in chatbots?

These are the questions we’re going to answer for you right now.

Ready? Let’s do this.

(Do you work in ecommerce? Stop reading and click here, we made
something for you.)
(p.s. here is where I believe the future of bots is headed, you will probably
disagree with me at rst.)

(p.p.s. My newest guide about conversational commerce is up, I think

you’ll nd it super interesting.)

“~90% of our time on mobile is spent on email and

messaging platforms. I would love to back teams
that build stu for places where the consumers hang
out!” — Niko Bonatsos, Managing Director at
General Catalyst

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What Is A Chatbot?
A chatbot is a service, powered by rules and sometimes arti cial
intelligence, that you interact with via a chat interface. The service
could be any number of things, ranging from functional to fun, and it
could live in any major chat product (Facebook Messenger, Slack,
Telegram, Text Messages, etc.).

“Many businesses already have phone trees and they

do work though most users get grumpy using them.
Text based response trees are much easier and faster
and that is what I expect a lot of early bot
interactions to be. Sometimes with ability to chat
with a live person.” — Josh Elman, Partner at Greylock

If you haven’t wrapped your head around it yet, don’t worry. Here’s
an example to help you visualize a chatbot.

Example:
If you wanted to buy shoes from Nordstrom online, you would go to
their website, look around until you nd the shoes you wanted, and
then you would purchase them.
If Nordstrom makes a bot, which I’m sure they will, you would simply
be able to message Nordstrom on Facebook. It would ask you what
you’re looking for and you would simply… tell it.

Instead of browsing a website, you will have a conversation with the

Nordstrom bot, mirroring the type of experience you would get
when you go into the retail store.

Facebook Showing Examples of Chat Bots

Watch this video from Facebook’s recent F8 conference (where they
make their major announcements). At the 7:30 mark, David Marcus,
the Vice President of Messaging Products at Facebook, explains what it
looks like to buy shoes in a Facebook Messenger bot.

David Marcus' Keynote @ Facebook F8 16'

Examples of Chatbots
Buying shoes isn’t the only thing chatbots can be used for. Here are
a couple of other examples:
 • Weather bot. Get the weather whenever you ask.

• Grocery bot. Help me pick out and order groceries for the week.

• News bot. Ask it to tell you when ever something interesting

happens.

• Life advice bot. I’ll tell it my problems and it helps me think of

solutions.

• Personal nance bot. It helps me manage my money better.

• Scheduling bot. Get me a meeting with someone on the Messenger

team at Facebook.

• A bot that’s your friend. In China there is a bot called Xiaoice, built
by Microsoft, that over 20 million people talk to.

See? With bots, the possibilities are endless. You can build
anything imaginable, and I encourage you to do just that.

But why make a bot? Sure, it looks cool, it’s using some super
advanced technology, but why should someone spend their time and
energy on it?

It’s a huge opportunity. HUGE. Scroll down and I’ll explain.

Why Chatbots Are Such A Big Opportunity
You are probably wondering “Why does anyone care about chatbots?
They look like simple text based services… what’s the big deal?”

Great question. I’ll tell you why people care about chatbots.

It’s because for the rst time ever people are using messenger apps
more than they are using social networks.
Let that sink in for a second.

People are using messenger apps more than they are using social
networks.

“People are now spending more time in messaging

apps than in social media and that is a huge turning
point. Messaging apps are the platforms of the
future and bots will be how their users access all
sorts of services.” — Peter Rojas, Entrepreneur in
Residence at Betaworks

So, logically, if you want to build a business online, you want to build
where the people are. That place is now inside messenger apps.

“Major shifts on large platforms should be seen as an

opportunities for distribution. That said, we need to
be careful not to judge the very early prototypes too
harshly as the platforms are far from complete. I
believe Facebook’s recent launch is the beginning of
a new application platform for micro application
experiences. The fundamental idea is that customers
will interact with just enough UI, whether
 conversational and/or widgets, to be delighted by a
service/brand with immediate access to a rich pro le
and without the complexities of installing a native
app, all fueled by mature advertising products. It’s
potentially a massive opportunity.” — Aaron Batalion,
Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners

This is why chatbots are such a big deal. It’s potentially a huge
business opportunity for anyone willing to jump head rst and
build something people want.

“There is hope that consumers will be keen on

experimenting with bots to make things happen for
them. It used to be like that in the mobile app world
4+ years ago. When somebody told you back then… ‘I
have built an app for X’… You most likely would give it
a try. Now, nobody does this. It is probably too late to
build an app company as an indie developer. But with
bots… consumers’ attention spans are hopefully
going to be wide open/receptive again!” — Niko
Bonatsos, Managing Director at General Catalyst

But, how do these bots work? How do they know how to talk to
people and answer questions? Isn’t that arti cial intelligence and isn’t
that insanely hard to do?
Yes, you are correct, it is arti cial intelligence, but it’s something that
you can totally do yourself.

Let me explain.

How Chatbots Work

There are two types of chatbots, one functions based on a set of rules,
and the other more advanced version uses machine learning.

What does this mean?

Chatbot that functions based on rules:

 • This bot is very very limited. It can only respond to very speci c
commands. If you say the wrong thing, it doesn’t know what you
mean.

• This bot is only as smart as it is programmed to be.

Chatbot that functions using machine learning:

• This bot has an arti cial brain AKA arti cial intelligence. You don’t
have to be ridiculously speci c when you are talking to it. It
understands language, not just commands.

• This bot continuously gets smarter as it learns from conversations

it has with people.

“Beware though, bots have the illusion of simplicity on

the front end but there are many hurdles to
overcome to create a great experience. So much
work to be done. Analytics, ow optimization,
keeping up with ever changing platforms that have
no standard. For deeper integrations and real
commerce like Assist powers, you have error
checking, integrations to APIs, routing and escalation
to live human support, understanding NLP, no back
buttons, no home button, etc etc. We have to unlearn
everything we learned the past 20 years to create an
amazing experience in this new browser.” — Shane
Mac, CEO of Assist

Bots are created with a purpose. A store will likely want to create a
bot that helps you purchase something, where someone like Comcast
might create a bot that can answer customer support questions.

“Messaging is where we spend a ton of our time and

expect to communicate. It is ridiculous we still have
to call most businesses.” — Josh Elman, Partner
at Greylock
You start to interact with a chatbot by sending it a message. Click here
to try sending a message to the CNN chatbot on Facebook.

Arti cial Intelligence

So, if these bots use arti cial intelligence to make them work well…
isn’t that really hard to do? Don’t I need to be an expert at arti cial
intelligence to be able to build something that has arti cial
intelligence?
Short answer? No, you don’t have to be an expert at arti cial
intelligence to create an awesome chatbot that has arti cial
intelligence. Just make sure to not over promise on your application’s
abilities. If you can’t make the product good with arti cial intelligence
right now, it might be best to not put it in yet.

“Everyone going after AI to try make this scale seems

a little too soon. Texting to a computer that doesn’t
understand many things you are saying can be very
aggravating. So be careful early not to over promise,
and give users guard rails” — Josh Elman, Partner
at Greylock

However, over the past decade quite a bit of advancements have been
made in the area of arti cial intelligence, so much in fact that anyone
who knows how to code can incorporate some level of arti cial
intelligence into their products.

How do you build arti cial intelligence into your bot? Don’t worry,
I’ve got you covered, I’ll tell you how to do it in the next section of this
post.
How To Build Chatbots
Building a chatbot can sound daunting, but it’s totally doable.
You’ll be creating an arti cial intelligence powered chatting machine in
no time (or, of course, you can always build a basic chat bot that
doesn’t have a fancy AI brain and strictly follows rules).

“The di culty in building a chatbot is less a technical

one and more an issue of user experience. The most
successful bots will be the ones that users want to
come back to regularly and that provide consistent
value.” — Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments
at Betaworks

You will need to gure out what problem you are going to solve with
your bot, choose which platform your bot will live on (Facebook, Slack,
etc), set up a server to run your bot from, and choose which service you
will use to build your bot.

“We believe that you don’t need to know how to

program to build a bot, that’s what inspired us at
 Chatfuel a year ago when we started bot builder. We
noticed bots becoming hyper-local, i.e. a bot for a
soccer team to keep in touch with fans or a small art
community bot. Bots are e cient and when you let
anyone create them easily magic happens.” — Dmitrii
Dumik, Founder of Chatfuel

Here are a ton of resources to get you started.

Platform documentation:

• Facebook Messenger

• Slack

• Discord

• Telegram

• Kik

“It’s hard to balance that urge to just dogpile the

latest thing when you’re feeling like there’s a land
grab or gold rush about to happen all around you
and that you might get left behind. But in the end
quality wins out. Everyone will be better o if there’s
laser focus on building great bot products that are
meaningfully di erentiated.” — Ryan Block, Cofounder
of Begin.com

Other Resources:

• How Bots Will Completely Kill Websites and Mobiles Apps by Matt
Schlicht

• Botlist, an app store for bots.

• The Secret To Building Your Own Facebook Chat Bot In Less Than
15 Minutes by Jerry Wang

• Go Library for Facebook Messenger Bots by Harrison Shoebridge

• How To Build Bots For Facebook Messenger by Facebook

 • Building Your Messenger Bot [Video] by Facebook

• Creating a Bot by Rob Ellis

• Botwiki

• Telegram Bot API — PHP SDK by Syed Irfaq

• A Beginner’s Guide To Your First (Slack) Bot by Slack

• Slackbot Tutorial by Michi Kono

• Create A Slackbot Using Botkit by Altitude Labs

• Sketch UI Kit For Messenger Bots by Mockuuups

• How to create your own Telegram bot who answer its users,
without coding by Chatfuel

• Chatbots.org

Don’t want to build your own?

• Contact me.

Now that you’ve got your chatbot and arti cial intelligence resources,
maybe it’s time you met other people who are also interested in
chatbots.
How To Meet People Interested
In Chatbots
Chatbots have been around for decades, but because of the recent
advancements in arti cial intelligence and machine learning, there is a
big opportunity for people to create bots that are better, faster, and
stronger.

If you’re reading this, you probably fall into one of these categories:

1. You want to learn how to build a chatbot.

2. You are currently building a chatbot or you have already built one.

3. You want to build a chatbot but you need someone else to help
you.

4. You are researching chatbots to see if you and your team should
build one.

5. You are an investor potentially interested in investing in chatbot

startups.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you had a place to meet, learn, and

share information with other people interested in chatbots? Yeah,
we thought so too.

That’s why I created a forum called “Chatbot News”, and it has

quickly become the largest community related to Chatbots.

The members of the Chatbots group are investors who manage well
over $2 billion in capital, employees at Facebook, Instagram, Fitbit,
Nike, and Ycombinator companies, and hackers from around the world.

We would love if you joined. Click here to request an invite private

chatbots community.

I have also created the Silicon Valley Chatbots Meetup, register here
to be noti ed when we schedule our rst event.

. . .

That’s all for now!

I wish you luck in your journey to create your own
chatbot and to dive head rst into the world of
arti cial intelligence (if you haven’t already). Join us in
this private community if you want to talk more.

. . .
Do you have an ecommerce company? We
launched Octane AI, and we can help you
do it. Learn more here.

Want to chat about bots? Are you thinking

of making a cool bot? Are you investing in
bots? Do you want feedback on your bot?
Send me a message now.
I promise it will be the real me that responds and not
a bot.

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