Tuesday Bot Teardowns: How the best startups are building amazing bots

One of the best ways to get a sense for how something works it to take it apart. The understanding that you can get by thinking about the various components of the system and the decisions that were made to create the final product can be illuminating — in a way that simply thinking about an experience with the product can’t quite capture.

To think more critically and deeply about bots, Mica and myself will share teardowns of bots that we’ve come across via this publication (follow it!). We’ll spend time using the bots as intended for at least two weeks, and go through a pre-defined outline to systematically take apart and understand the components of each bot. There will be a new teardown every Tuesday.

We also know that the overall experience is very important. We won’t only focus on the UI elements, the language choices, or the icons used to represent these human-like entities. We’ll also be adding out our personal experiences to the reviews — how did the bot make us feel? What type of relationship did we develop with the bot, with each other, with other people because of the bot? What changed in our lives with the inclusion of this bot? We’ll also try to put ourselves into the shoes of the people making these bots — why did they make certain decisions? What would we have done differently, and why?

We’re excited to get started — the first teardown will be up tomorrow — and hope you’ll follow along via the ddouble.ai Medium publication!

PS: If you missed it, be sure to check out the Bot Stack Compendium we released last week, to collect all bot-related tools and services