Record Bird

@__tosh Thanks for hunting and introducing our chatbot to the community here on Product Hunt today. We believe bots can offer a playful way for users to interact with our product with the smallest friction possible. Users remain in the well known environment of their messaging app and little to no effort is required to evaluate the potential of a new product or getting to a specific information super quickly. I'm here with our CTO @graf_arnold today to answer any questions you might have! Let's do this! :) Try our bot: http://m.me/recordbird

@__tosh we're quietly rolling out a brand new version of our #chatbot for @recordbird_com & wanted to give you an early look! Wanna give it a spin? http://m.me/recordbird

@quadres Not at all, we'll launch our iOS app this summer! :) We believe that bots and apps simply fulfil a different purpose: Bots help users to easily experiment with new products. They make a first contact painless. Also, they can be very helpful to deliver short pieces of information to a user within a highly relevant environment. (Companies now have a touchpoint with users which was previously strictly limited to friends, family and colleagues). Native apps is still where the deep engagement takes place. I highly doubt that bots will replace apps in the future - nor should they. The interface and engagement is likely to limited - generic and not customised - to fully support each experience. We do believe though, that bots can be the next big thing in any product’s user acquisition cycle. Lastly, we didn't involve our users when making the decision to develop a bot. The topics is probably still too new, few people - apart from the PH community - currently grasp the full potential of this opportunity. Nevertheless, we involved various different users in the development of the bot experience which was crucial for its development.

@quadres we're quietly rolling out a brand new version of our #chatbot for @recordbird_com & wanted to give you an early look! Wanna give it a spin? http://m.me/recordbird

@smalzner @mahringer_a hi Stefan, having jumped on the node.js train a while ago, we used an npm package to provide the webhook (simply called “messenger-bot”). Although Facebook’s docs for the API were still brand new, integration with it was quite pain-free (except for a few nasty typos in the specifications :)). The Record Bird bot itself is built as a micro-service that uses a graph to decide how to respond to queries. A little bit of tree-search logic tracks individual users as they move through the graph and generates replies based on that information. NLP/NLA is obviously a huge topic for us, and we plan to use wit.ai or a similar service for basic semantic analysis, plus a bit of custom parsing logic because there are just so many different artist names / genre-name renditions out there. Wit.ai looks pretty promising as it has a very usable interface and seems really focussed on conversational analysis. Hope this helps!

@smalzner we're quietly rolling out a brand new version of our #chatbot for @recordbird_com & wanted to give you an early look! Wanna give it a spin? http://m.me/recordbird

@__tosh We’ve also developed a chatbot for Kik. You can give it a try here: http://bots.kik.com/#/recordbird For our use case, Facebook definitely offers the best UI at the moment. As the CTA Buttons are attached to the message, the user can click on buttons or type without switching keyboards (as is the case with Kik). The biggest advantage of Kik is that it offers a dedicated "BotShop", which makes the discovery for users rather easy, therefore generates a constant inbound of traffic. From what we know, Facebook and Telegram don't plan to launch anything similar at the moment. The real potential lies in the personalisation of bots - personalisation in the most literal sense of the world: people dislike talking to robots or programs as much as they dislike having a conversation with an answering machine. We want to engage with people and the best alternative to a real dialogue could be a human like conversation with a program. So we work towards making your bot experience with Record Bird more personal and human, both in terms of personalising the content we show you (e.g. based on your Facebook Likes) but also in terms of offering you more natural ways to engage with the chatbot. The best bots will be able to process and interpret input beyond the command line. For now, we’ll focus on optimising the current experience for our bots on Facebook and Kik. We want to learn how people currently engage with them and optimise based on these insights.

@patprokesch Compared to Spotify or Apple Music, Record Bird offers an information advantage which triggers valuable discourse amongst the target audience. Record Bird tells you about a new release before it actually happens. The digital music age shows very clearly, that the time leading up to a release - and the conversations prompted in that period - are as vital and crucial to a successful release as the music itself. This opportunity to communicate release information early, engage fans and influencers and build momentum towards the release day, clearly differentiates us from release day notifications by any streaming service.

@mahringer_a great, thanks this makes it more clear. love that you guys are so close to the artists. I'm a user already <><

@patprokesch we're quietly rolling out a brand new version of our #chatbot for @recordbird_com & wanted to give you an early look! Wanna give it a spin? http://m.me/recordbird

@wannabeedison it's a great question: First of all, barriers of downloading an app, typing URLs into mobile phones, signing up, putting in credit card details, etc. are being eroded almost entirely for a first product experience through chatbots. Users can play around with new products or features from the well known environment of their messaging app. It will be hard to predict whether bots offer the opportunity for deep engagement for all products, but they surely will play a crucial role in the growth engines of many future products and companies. The first "aha-moment", where users start to appreciate a product is just so much closer. Second of all, we believe that chatbots could become as big as mobile apps one day, so it pays off to jump on the train early! :)

@mahringer_a got it! all the best with your bot. I'll watch it closely

@wannabeedison Don't just watch it, chat with it! :)

@wannabeedison we're quietly rolling out a brand new version of our #chatbot for @recordbird_com & wanted to give you an early look! Wanna give it a spin? http://m.me/recordbird

@peterbuch As of today, the core difference is the users’ opportunity to fully customise their experience when using the web application via www.recordbird.com We’ve built integrations for Spotify / Facebook which allow users to import and track hundreds of their favourite artists within seconds - either by importing their Facebook Likes or they Spotify Library. We’re currently evaluating how to best bring this experience to our chatbot experience, therefore making the release alerts much more personalised to each individual user’s taste.

@peterbuch we're quietly rolling out a brand new version of our #chatbot for @recordbird_com & wanted to give you an early look! Wanna give it a spin? http://m.me/recordbird