How we created Politibot, the bot who reports on Telegram Messenger about the Spanish election campaign
The idea of building Politibot came out of one of the panels of ISOJ, the conference organized by professor Rosental Alves at the University of Texas in Austin. Zach Seward, Rebecca Harris, Alastair Coote and Alex Swan presented four journalistic projects that use messaging apps and artificial intelligence.
The best examples were the Quartz app for iPhone and Purple messaging service, which reports by SMS on the presidential campaign. The first project offers two daily digests, a chart that appears on your notifications’ screen and a haiku describing how were things on Wall Street. The second one builds a story with charts, statements and maps about what is happening every day of the campaign.
Quartz and Purple are just two examples of a broader trend that some media are beginning to explore. Direct traffic is increasingly scarce, clicks to links on social networks like Twitter or Facebook have plummeted and news organizations haven’t found a way to make money from apps like Instagram or Snapchat.
The advertising business is no longer a monopoly of the newspapers. The rise of the smartphone has strengthened the influence of Google and Facebook. They take 85% of the ads and threaten to take even more money from an industry suffering from the influence of intermediaries and from the rise of the ad blockers, born from the terrible user experience that most of the news outlets give their audience on every device.
Messaging apps are very interesting in this context because they allow us to enter the most intimate environment of our audiences: the one where they talk to their friends or their family and where spend more time than in any news website.
Time is a scarce commodity. Especially now that any distraction sneaks into our cell phones and that is so hard to keep the attention of our audience. That’s why is so valuable to set daily routines with your readers and to establish a link to build a community.
Those were our goals when we started to build Politibot: provide useful information to political junkies throughout the campaign of the Spanish general election held on June 26th.
In early May, I mentioned the idea to Martín González, designer, data journalist and author of gems like this news app for the Spanish newspaper El Español.
The first thing we did was to consider every possible option. Our goal was to build a bot for a messaging app. WhatsApp is massive in Spain but it doesn’t allow you to build a bot yet. We could have explore Purple platform but we didn’t think it was a good idea in Spain: here nobody uses SMS anymore and most of the people have to pay for every SMS sent from their telephone.
There were two options left: learn how to build a bot on Facebook Messenger or try to do it on Telegram, where we had observed some interesting projects.
Spanish polling firm Metroscopia and Spanish newspapers El Mundo, El Confidencial or eldiario.es have opened their own channels on Telegram and outlets such as Forbes or TechCrunch have created simple bots made with the help of a startup called ChatFuel.
We wanted to go a little bit further. Our constraints were time and the limited development of artificial intelligence. Our competitive advantage was not to be limited by the daily routines of a newsroom.
At the beginning, we considered using the ChatFuel platform. But then we were joined by Juan Font, whom we met through Kiko Llaneras and who immediately took on the challenge of building the whole architecture of the project from the Dutch city of Leiden, where he works as a developer for the European Space Agency (ESA).
As for the name, there were other options but we finally settled for Politibot: a name that allows us to keep the project alive to report on any election worldwide. We wanted to achieve at least three things with @politibot:
- To offer every morning a digest with charts, articles, polls and audio files on the Spanish election campaign.
- To keep a data base with articles, charts and polls that every user could search and share whenever he wanted.
- To offer some of the election data personalized to the user profile and location.
Juan Font started to work with Telegram’s API at the end of May. Together we designed the main menu and some of the other features. Our goal was to offer a curated version of the campaign coverage, with articles selected carefully by real people. An election campaign is a very noisy environment and we think you can extract real value if you cut into that noise and offer context about what’s happening on the campaign trail.
The talent and dedication of Juan Font allowed us to launch Politibot the day before the campaign started and the day the most important poll was released. Kiko Llaneras and I used the data of that poll to build the welcome greeting of our bot: a game with the figures of that poll.
A week before the launch, two other valuable people joined the project. The first one was the developer David Martín-Corral, who helped us with the most difficult part: to teach our robot to process natural language. The second one was the sociologist Jorge Galindo, who was immediately enthusiastic about the project and offered his good judgment, his ideas and his voice.
Some other people have provided suggestions and lots of hours to the project. Others are about to start working with us.
For now, Politibot is just an experiment that aims to cover this campaign with a different voice. The first figures are encouraging. In just 72 hours, the bot has attracted 2,600 users and has generated more than 6,000 sessions. Two thirds of those sessions lasted more than a minute and a quarter lasted more than five minutes.
Our goal now is to improve our offer throughout the campaign, to develop original data visualizations and to cover the leaders debate and the election night. We don’t have a company behind us and we don’t receive any funding for what we do. We like the idea of creating an innovative product and exploring new ways to be where our audience is. Let’s see what the future holds.
Politibot is still clumsy but will gradually improve: the best is yet to come.
You can add Politibot on Telegram clicking on this link. If you enjoyed this article, click the green heart and you will help others to discover it. You can also leave a comment or follow on Medium or Twitter #nohacefaltapapel.
