Wrapping up Bot Month

During the month of May, ReadyTalk’s DART team has been championing a new kind of internal innovation for our organization: Bot Month.

Among other successes, Bot Month finally gave me an opportunity to use my Microsoft Paint skills for a cause larger than myself.

Bot Month was the first in a series of themed challenges hosted by ReadyTalk through our newly-launched Innovation program. The idea behind our themed challenges was simple. We’d bring in speakers and other resources around a topic and then let our teams unleash their talent on a specific problem or opportunity. We selected bots as our first strategic challenge as we’re in the communication space, and we recognize how communications are changing. Platforms like Slack and Facebook Messenger have millions of users and we recognize the importance of people being able to do their jobs better by using the platform they prefer. So with that in mind, we set out the following challenge for the month:

“Design a bot that helps ReadyTalk customers or employees do their jobs better.”

So what did you do for Bot Month?

For Bot Month, we spun up a Slack channel to keep everybody in the know as far as upcoming happenings were concerned. I made a bunch of terrible posters and put those up around the office. We had four events we wanted to host throughout the course of May. The first was the Bot Month Kickoff where we introduced the concept of the challenge and had some early discussions around bot concepts. Later that same week, we brought in Mike Brevoort of Robots and Pencils and Beep Boop fame to speak to the organization about where he thinks bots are headed. Two weeks later, we hosted our Bot Month Brainstorming session where we ended up with more ideas than we knew what to do with. Finally, this week we hosted an all-day Hackathon to give our engineers a chance to actually build the bot they’ve been talking about. This Friday will be the big reveal where we’ll get to see what everybody worked on.

Spoiler Alert: Bot Month started before we knew (for sure) that Jon Snow was coming back to life

Speaker: Mike Brevoort

Andrea discovered Beep Boop (and by extension, Mike) when working on a bot herself late last year. She was impressed with the ease of the platform and the meta-ness of a bot that helps you build and deploy bots.. Like I mentioned, Mike has done work with both Robots and Pencils, and their offshoot Beep Boop. While he wears a CTO hat at R&P, he gets to wear the (more fun?) Founder hat at Beep Boop. If you’re unfamiliar with Beep Boop, they’re a bot hosting platform with a remarkably fun name to say out loud.

Currently, Beep Boop supports Facebook Messenger and Slack bots and they let you, “host, deploy and share your bot in seconds.” We were able to have a really rich dialogue around what Mike’s seen in the wild and what he thinks is going to be the future of bots. The full interview was streamed on Periscope and is available if you want to check it out.

Fair warning: I’m super awkward throughout. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Bot Month Brainstorm

To correctly read this section of the post, you need to play this in the background to most accurately recreate the mood of the brainstorming session.

The next event on the docket for Bot Month was our brainstorming event in the middle of May. Led by our in-house UX champion, Nam, we ended up with 54 ideas that afternoon for potential bots. We uploaded all of the ideas onto the JIRA board we had created and opened up voting to the entire company. Some of the bot ideas were completely new, some of them were revisions on an old theme, and at least 15% of them involved food. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think it officially counts as a bot brainstorm unless there’s some pizza involved somewhere.

Hackathon

The second to last event in Bot Month was our Hackathon which happened earlier this week.

Being a South Floridian, I was pleased to share the Gospel of DJ Khaled with my colleagues. It’s not just Snapchat, y’all #WeTheBest

The challenge was a simple one: Pick a platform where your users spend their time and pick an idea off of the JIRA board. We provided our engineers with bot building services and some ideas for platforms they could explore. We had teams form around 11 different bot ideas, we brought in breakfast burritos and sandwiches, and let everybody loose.

We’re waiting for Friday afternoon to see what everybody made during the Hackathon. In true ReadyTalk fashion, we’re going to have a demo afternoon this week where the beer and the good times will be flowing. It’s going to be really exciting to see what our band of merry engineers put together. Next week, we’ll get together with stakeholders to evaluate which, if any, projects will move forward.

We’re not going to spill the beans on the ideas folks worked on, but when you eventually see a ReadyTalk bot, you’ll know where it got its start.