Introducing Bothello, A Conversational Intelligence & Design Agency
I’ve been fascinated with chatbots ever since SmarterChild appeared on my MSN friends list over 10 years ago.
I’d spend hours picking its brain — telling it secrets too personal to tell my friends, and sending it questions too awkward to ask my parents.
I thought it was brilliant, and always wondered how it knew so much.
Fast forward to 2016 and I am still fascinated by chatbots.
I’ve been using chatbots for a number of applications ever since they were available. I even bought Amazon’s Echo Dot when it first came out in the US, using a workaround to enable access to its services in Australia.
I was so eager to try it.
It’s my alarm, how I listen to podcasts, how I get the news, and how I check the price of bitcoin.
It’s an area of artificial intelligence that solves real pain points for everyday users.
However, I never really understood how it worked. After resigning from my corporate job last year I finally had time to experiment, read about chatbots, and understand the science behind the technology.
I got together with a friend of mine and we started building.
Introducing Bothello
As you may have picked up, Bothello is the combination of the words bot + hello. We decided to pronounce it both-ello to give it a warmer/artsy feel — rather than the cold dystopian AI mega-corporation names that also made our shortlist (maybe next time Onomous).
Bothello is the brainchild of Jay Farrell and myself. Jay is a good friend from school who is a wiz full-stack developer and a great salesman — we’ve started a number of businesses together, working side-by-side for just over 8 months.
We’ve positioned Bothello as a design-centric AI agency; incorporating our backgrounds in graphic design, web design, and UX design into the technology and conversational flows.
Feel free to chat with our own chatbot here, feedback more than welcome (email@bothello.io).
Our side project
We’re also building an analytics platform for marketers, conversation designers, and chatbot developers to assist with generating reports, analysing engagement, viewing top queries/keywords, and understanding user sentiment — among other things.
After working with a few chatbots now we’ve realised that their ‘quality’ is determined by the designers ability to incorporate conversational insights back into its design.
Hence the need for a customised analytics tool to produce these insights — more details on this to come, stay tuned :)
It’s been an enlightening journey to say the least, but I’m confident I’ll see this one through.
This is a space I’m truly interested and invested in — conversational interfaces will forever change the way we engage with technology.
I look forward to messaging my bank to buy bitcoin, asking the driverless vehicle to turn on Netflix, and conversing with Artificial Intelligence about the future of humanity.
