How to combine Visual Search and IM

In this text we will try to briefly explain IM applications integration with Visual Search. You can read more about Visual Search implementation in our last blog post.

Instant Messaging (IM) and Chatbots

Among all other benefits, The Internet has transformed and simplified how people communicate with each other. In addition to email, IM has played a large role in bringing people together. From ICQ to MSN, Facebook Chat to Viber and WhatsApp, Internet users have been able to send messages to each other instantaneously for years. In the digital age, instant messaging is the easiest way to communicate with other people. No wonder our clients were very interested in this type of communication and integrations with different types of popular chatbots. Chatbot is a type of the Internet bot (web robot, robot or simply bot) that can simulate real conversations with people through instant messaging apps.

Viber

Rakuten Viber is a cross-platform Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and instant messaging (IM) software application operated by Japanese multinational company Rakuten, provided as freeware for the Android, iOS, Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux platforms. Users are registered and identified through a cellular telephone number, although the service is accessible on desktop platforms without needing mobile connectivity. In addition to instant messaging it allows users to exchange media such as images and video records. As of 2018, there are over a billion registered users on the network.

In Viber, bots can be created very simply via a bot user token that can access multiple Viber’s APIs (https://developers.viber.com/docs/api/):

  1. Node.JS
  2. Python
  3. REST API

Let’s see how Viber bot works:

      1. Sending image for recommendation:

      2. Viber bot is sending recommendations instantly:

Telegram

Telegram is a freeware, cross-platform cloud-based instant messaging, video calling, and VoIP service. It was initially launched for iOS on 14 August 2013 in Russia, and is currently based in Dubai. Official Telegram client apps are available for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS and Linux, as well as for the now-discontinued Windows Phone.

How do I create a bot?

There’s a… bot for that. Just talk to BotFather (@botfather). You just need to log in in Telegram, search for @botfather and there you can find all other steps. Telegram APIs – https://core.telegram.org/bots 

Let’s see how Telegram bot works:

      1. Sending image for recommendation:

      2. Telegram bot is sending recommendations instantly:

Slack

Slack (“Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge” is an backronym for “Slack”) is a business communication platform launched in 2013, and developed by American software company Slack Technologies. It offers many features, including persistent chat rooms (channels) organized by topic, private groups, and direct messaging.

In Slack, a bot is controlled programmatically via a bot user token that can access one or more of Slack’s APIs – https://api.slack.com/ . ? 

What can Slack bots do?

  • Monitor and help process channel activity
  • Post messages in channels and react to members’ activity
  • Make channel messages interactive with buttons

Let’s see how Slack bot works:

      1. Sending image for recommendation with “recommend” text:

       2. Slack bot is sending recommendations instantly:

As you can see, it’s not that hard to create and test simple bot applications like we did for Viber, Telegram and Slack. All you need is a test server and well documented API for the bot you want to use. ?

 

Photo credits: https://unsplash.com/photos/GWkioAj5aB4

Understand and Engage your customer(s) with more AI power

Today we are happy to release Solver AI Suite 2.0. You can read more about it in this post. The focus of the past three months was on collecting and working on clients’ feedback. We decided to ask more and work more to boost the revenue of our clients. Several key things popped out from this process. The first one – our users want to know their customers(s) even better and easily understand them while having all customer-related data in one place. The second thing is how to engage them quickly and at the right time. Okay, it sounds like everyone’s wishes and that it is the promise of all similar tools, but we focused on making the whole process simple, in a couple of clicks, while maintaining top quality. We want to follow the way of simplicity with power. Like the great Steve Jobs once said, “That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”  

Key new features

New Portal interface – we redesigned the entrance app to be more seamless and more informative. We are now offering two unique views, depending on whether you are a new user and want to read more about our offer, or you are a veteran of tools, and you need one click to start your daily job.

Campaign Studio interface – now focused on channels. We pulled the audience build process as a separate app. Now Campaign Studio is more focused on marketing departments, allowing marketing people to use the tool on their own easily. You can create and schedule a marketing campaign in 5 steps.

 

Campaign Studio Viber channel upgrade – imagine that you want to send personalized messages to your customers to get different sets of products in one click. You need to have pictures of your products, and pricing and the tool can do the rest.   

 

Creative Studio Beta, we make the first steps to offering a template engine inside our tool but do not worry, we will support other email template engines too.

 

Audience Studio Interface – our superstar of this release. We improved this process so that you can create ANY audience in 5 steps. You can have all filters you want under your click and fit audiences perfectly to your business needs. You choose to power up the selection with AI model(s) output. Unique, we designed one step focused on the product, allowing the users to find the most appropriate/best audiences for selected products. Here we engaged our complex and powerful Recommendation Engine, but as stated before – you can use it with just a couple of clicks. What else:

  • You can use the created audience for the campaign 
  • You can download the audience as excel or CSV file  
  • You can choose the audience to be static or dynamic 

 

As you can see, Audience Studio can be a self-service insight tool. 

Audience Dynamics or Statics – the audience can be static, and you can use it now or want to look at insights. But nowadays, things are changing. Behavior is changing. That’s why we introduced dynamic audiences, which AI models automatically update. You can sit back and relax, knowing you can use this kind of audience for Marketing Automation or repetitive campaigns. You can be focused on creativity and not on overloading your IT department with requests for data. 

Recommender Engine update – we are constantly upgrading our Recommendation models, now we can support better results to push leaflets personalized to your customers. Second and very important, we shorten the process from data to recommendations.  

Profile Studio, we renamed Personalizer to a new name, and we cleaned some things. More importantly, we can add items dynamically. Imagine you have additional information you want to see in one place or show to your colleagues – you do not need to do anything. Just provide us data, and we will add it in a couple of seconds. 

Smart Segmentation interface, we released a new interface which is more informative and can support multiple segmentation reports.

Other 

  • As you might know, we are focused on API first strategy. Everything we mention our clients can leverage by using REST API and embed these functionalities into existing apps or processes
  • We released Events API for easier integration
  • Privacy and Security, we improved our process and APIs to make sure that there is no room for this kind of problems 

What we plan for the future releases

Here are some things related to the topic that we are working on:

  • Push notification channel via firebase
  • Digital Edge by ASEE as a channel.  
  • Assceo Live deeper integration.
  • Reporting page for selected audience.
  • Open selected Audience in BI tool.  
  • Campaign Studio improved reporting. We want to add more things so you can make better decisions for the future.
  • Creative Studio for easy email template creating.
  • Create an Audience from Profile Studio, choosing similar customers based on the selected customer. 
  • Look-alike model implementation, so you can extend target groups with a move of a slider. 
  • Create an Audience from Smart Segmentation Studio directly choosing customers by special rules.  
  • Product Studio for the product manager, create an audience starting from the product or check KPI’s before making a decision.
  • Campaign Studio A/B testing functionalities.
  • AI model improvements 
  • Customer Journey detection.

Other

  • Forecast Studio for doing forecast in couple clicks
  • Anomaly Detection model update
  • Atlas update

We are focused on providing what our clients need. If you have any feedback or you want to schedule a demo, please drop us a message at ai@thingsolver.com

Stay tuned for more.