Rebuilding the Tower of Babel
From an Open Source project to an actual Startup
Wednesday, August 2nd, 2017. It’s 6:01pm here in Montreal and the five of us — Issam, Loris, Dustin, Eder and me — are gathered around Issam’s laptop. A slight perfume of excitement mixed with just enough anxiety is floating in the air. A minute ago, we all pushed the button that pushed Broid’s API live.
Yes we are live.
Boy, we’re excited!
How about taking a minute to look back on our journey so far?
(I only ask to be somewhat polite ’cause you know, it’s already written)
Two steps back
Somewhere between 2015 and 2016, Issam started exploring the AI world, fiercely believing the near future would see the rise of “Conversation as a Platform”.
While aiming to build his long-dreamed virtual assistant, one of his first struggle was adding his bot to a new messaging channel. Each time, it meant reading a specific API documentation, integrating a new schema, testing, maintaining, etc.
WHAT THE HECK?
I mean, the single easiest and most basic thing in the AI field — the broadcasting part — is unbelievably tedious work! A modern version of the Tower of Babel where the great god of Messaging decided to make sure all the channels would speak a different language!
That’s about when Loris came into the picture. Talking about that major issue, they realized that the integration work Issam had done could definitely be useful to others. Bringing Dustin onboard, they decided to go open source, cleaned up the code, used W3C standards for the Broid’s schema. The repo was published on GitHub in February 2017.
Hence, Broid was born. Just a discreet release and a featuring on Product Hunt .
A freemium model?
It has then been six incredible months. We’ve received tons of acknowledgements, comments, questions, feedback allowing us to further Broid’s integrations and performances. Our community is just the best :)
Two (big) highlights worth mentioning: we were invited to the Google Spark Program and joined GitHub Startup Program as well for our contribution in the Open Source Community.
But the major takeaway of those 6 months was a surprise to us. A growing base of Broid’s users were asking us to release our own public API, saying that they’ll definitely pay for that service.
We listened and here we are. Launching Broid’s API.
“Ok, so you guys just gave up your open source principle?”
Oh yes we’re actually very greedy and only went open source with an evil masterplan to take your money eventually.
Ahah. Nope.
Obviously, Broid is still and always will be Open Source based. You can use it for free with the GitHub repo and we will continue to add features, maintain everything, answer questions and support our community.
The only difference is that you can pay for a premium service if you choose to.
For example, one of our upcoming integrations is MessageBird. If you’re a paid user you get access to that new channel immediately. If you’re an open source user, then you’ll have to wait a few months before it’s released as part of our GitHub repo.
Did I mention the price? I guess I didn’t. We wanted the API to be dead cheap. After all, Broid is really about the democratization of messaging.
We really built Broid as simple as it gets, so our pricing reflects that.
So, let’s say that you have a chatbot that converse with your users on Messenger, Skype, WeChat and SMS (using Twilio). You’ll pay $9.99 x 4 channels x 1 app (chatbot) = $39.96
If you’re an agency with plenty of apps running for your clients, just shoot an email to hello [at] broid.ai and we’ll see what we can do for your business case.
Oh and of course, you may have noticed, messages/conversations are unlimited (I mean, are we still in the era of greedy cell phone carriers? Let’s be serious please).
Live Chat? But of course
Another thing that our community asked for was a Broid-based live chat that they could use on both websites and mobile apps.
Why?
Because they were looking for a easy and scalable way to replicate the exact same interactive experience they built on a channel like Messenger or Slack into their Website.
Well. You have it all.
With Broid’s own live chat, you have access to the best features of interactive conversations (smart replies, buttons, carrousels, etc.). And of course you can manage those conversations from your favorite tools like Slack, Messenger or 18 other channels (so far)!
Introducing Broid Bot
We’re currently in a private Beta but we do open new slots every week. So if you are interested, make sure to use our Bot:
You’ll see, he’s fun and he’ll proceed to your registration in a dedicated fashion! Plus, there are easter eggs hidden if you show him some love :)
Looking ahead
From day one, our vision was to empower the AI community, starting by providing the means to connect all messaging channels together. That’s a first step in rebuilding that Tower of Babel 2.0: one language. But we’re not exactly where we want to be yet, language evolve and can be improved. So we have started to collaborate with our friends of the W3C. You’ll definitely hear from us on that subject soon!
But we have other exciting things in the pipeline as well: our website, new integrations (like previously said: MessageBird channel), stay tuned by following our Twitter account and Facebook Page.
I’ll leave you with Broid’s moto (more about it in a coming article):
Don’t ask, just do it.
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 Interactive Live Chat powered by the best conversational features available.
Broid is open-source based, check out our GitHub Repositories and built with ♥︎in Montréal, Canada
