Interniser Version 2: Productivity 

Admin on 29/01/2017

With version 1 of my Interniser bot deployed to live for the ATBA-UK, I decided to build version 2 to answer my questions about using bots to help with productivity. 

Interniser Version 2: Productivity

For my MVP Productivity Bot I integrated with ToDoIst, Trello and Freshdesk. I use ToDoIst for task management, Trello for managing the progress and status of projects, and Freshdesk for customer service enquiries so being able to interact with them over Messenger showed me that a bot could be used as a single interface for all of these different systems. 

As this was a quick MVP I only built the integration to add to these systems, but the API between the chatbot and ToDoIst, Trello and Freshdesk allows for much more control. 

The next bot I’m thinking of (Version 3) will be a helper bot and test how bots can be a bit more human and have a long term conversation. 

What next for Interniser

Admin on 07/01/2017

The bot that I built on Interniser has been moved to its permanent home with ATBA-UK. It has some additional functionality such as being able to send a message to a human and we still have to name it (Atbamus Prime is my favourite), but moving it frees up Interniser for the next project.

I haven’t quite decided what the next project should be but I’m interested in two areas; how bots can provide information to a user, and how bots collect information from a user. The bot I built for ATBA-UK did a bit of both but I’d like to take it further.

Providing information is probably the more challenging of the two because I can only guess at what the user is looking for and if I get it wrong then the user has a poor experience and goes away unsatisfied.

Collecting information is a bit easier as it starts with me deciding what questions to ask, but motivating users to bother answering is another matter.

I did think about building a bot that provides the info on my website but a) no one would be interested, and b) there really isn’t anywhere to go from there.

I guess I’ll keep looking for ideas.