In an earlier post, we had described the bot life cycle. Bot development involves multiple stages in building a good bot: requirements, spec, script, architect, dev, test, deploy, publish, monitor, promote, analyze, repeat.

Bot platforms and other tools are emerging that make bot building easier. Some tools make it easy to create template-based bots. These may be adequate for simple use cases, but they don’t scale to more advanced bots. Other tools are more full featured and give developers the ability to create advanced bots quickly and easily.

Gupshup, has been building bots long before it became trendy. We’ve been building sms-based interactive services for years. We even built an enterprise-messaging app Teamchat, which enabled advanced bots back in 2014. Having built and deployed hundreds of bots, and having helped our customers build thousands more, we have experienced, many times over, the challenges of building and managing good bots in scale.

Cisco brings some (real) friends to the chat-bot party

Cisco’s new partnerships with Gupshup and Api.ai should bring more bots into the Spark messaging platform

The next time you chat with someone on Cisco Systems’ Spark messaging service, that someone may not be a co-worker — or even a person. Welcome to the world of bots.

On Monday at the Cisco Live conference, Cisco said it’s working with the messaging company Gupshup so more developers can bring their bots into Spark. It also introduced a partnership with Api.ai, a natural-language software company, in part to help developers build interfaces where users can just talk to bots.

By Beerud Sheth

Founder & CEO | gupshup.io

July 14, 2016

Bots will soon transform the world of productivity tools, business workflows, and enterprise software. The change will happen incrementally, almost invisibly, until it redefines software completely. Remember the old story about boiling a frog?

Starting with mainframes and COBOL, each version of computing technology has been applied to the cause of automating, simplifying and codifying business processes. Enterprise software tools such as ERP, HR, CRM and accounting automate business workflows; create structured entities; divide it into roles; map it to specific screens, and create views for each individual user. The end user experience typically involves form-based UI for data input and reports for data output.

By Beerud Sheth

Founder & CEO | gupshup.io

July 5, 2016

When developing a cross-platform bot, one of the most frustrating challenges is the difficulty in testing the bot in-channel across multiple channels (such as Slack, fbm, Telegram etc). In-channel testing enables the developer to instantly review the end-user experience, speeding up the iterative dev-test bot lifecycle. This problem is even more acute for cross-platform bots since the testing has to be done on multiple messaging channels.