Broid: Beyond
[Part 1] Beyond Messaging
This article is the first among a short series where I will share with you the vision behind Broid, how we intend to accomplish it and the milestones we reached on our journey.
I’m not going to convince you that conversational web is the next big thing because, well, unless you’ve been out of internet reach for the last year, you ought to see it everyday: 1.2 billion users for Facebook Messenger, explosion of chatbots, messaging apps opening their APIs, conversational commerce (credit to Chris Messina), etc. If you still need some explanation and great insights, our friends at Intercom, messaging early believers, nailed it in this article.
I’m not new to the social messaging game. Back in early 2015, I started to work on side projects based on messaging. It was the beginning of the rush towards the virtual assistants with Magic or GoButler available mostly through SMS. At that time, there was still a major scepticism around the external usage of messaging apps. I remember pitching with Cyril “Pepito” Marques a food delivery chatbot solely based on Facebook Messenger and Twitter DM. The main concern was the same across all potential investors: “you don’t have an app, you don’t control the user experience”.
Boy, were they wrong.
Of course, the team and I are all the more convinced of the importance of Conversation As A Platform (or what we will call CaaP). And a new paradigm shift always brings along challenges: Big “message” Data, fragmentation of messaging protocols, conversational UX, etc. I’ll detail below how we intend to solve them with Broid’s vision.
Broid Stage 0: Tower of Babel 2.0
The first challenge we want to address is the fragmentation of messaging protocols.
Maybe you’re familiar with the myth of the Tower of Babel (to be clear, this is not me being religious, but merely offering an analogy): Mankind aimed at building the Tower of Babel to reach for the god(s). As a punishment for hubris, various languages were created rendering communication between nations nearly impossible and ultimately stoping the construction.
Well today, messaging APIs all have their specific schema, features, documentation, etc. So a lot of developers — and I know that by personal experience — spend an awful amount of time integrating those channels.
A developer needs an average of 3 weeks to integrate a third party API.
Broid reduces those 3 tedious weeks to a matter of minutes, allowing you to focus on your product and the added value brought to your users. So we basically aimed at rebuilding the Tower of Babel — version 2.0 : democratizing web messaging with a standard vocabulary for several languages.
Broid Stage 1: User focused Messaging
This second step, made possible by Stage 0, will bring the user at the center of the Messaging Experience.
How? By allowing developers, companies, startups to collect information, contextual data and authentication.
Thinks about the time and effort spent by customer support on repeating the same information or same answers. Another use cases: how many times did you actually order the same drink in a Starbucks? or you need to respond to: “What is your date of birth?” Those repetitive interactions are worthless but they happen all the time on a daily basis and of course both in a professional and personal environment.
Add contextual memory to a conversation to render it swifter and more efficient.
By enabling developers to easily and quickly access that contextual memory, the user experience becomes real and innovative.
And because we’re so convinced in our vision, I’m both happy and excited to announce that in parallel of our Beta Program, we’re working with some of our customers on what we call “Beyond Messaging” or BeMe.
BeMe brings a new way to consume a message by adding meta information such an entity reco, intent detection or memory data.
The possibilities are endless along with powerful use cases. A customer support agent will be able to know relevant information about his/her interlocutor before even asking a question. Or a botmaker won’t need to multiply API requests in order to process a plain message.
That’s how you make conversational experience better.
Issam, Broid’s CEO
You shouldn’t spend time integrating messaging APIs. You should focus on your core product. With Broid API, get instant access to all the major messaging channels as well as our own Web Messenger powered by the best conversational features available.
Broid is open-source based, check out our GitHub Repositories.
Built with ♥︎ in Montréal, Canada
