Hoşsohbot (hadikaynatalim.com)

Our new product is the most capable one ever. Three companies, Botego, Rabarba and Sestek joined forces to put their expertise on the table. Result is Hoşsohbot. The client is a Unilever brand: Lipton.

Hoşsohbot utilizes numerous innovative features that a chatbot has to offer. She recognizes names, thousands of records including movie titles, soccer teams and players, song names and artists, astrological signs and a lot more. She can locate the user and surprise him/her by talking about local weather conditions. She can start certain dialogs based on a pre-determined scenario, and remembers everything the user says, so that she can use that information during the whole session.

I don't want to disclose all features on this blog post, so that you can discover them for yourself. Apart from those features, Hoşsohbot is a good example as to how a chatbot experience can be enriched by making use of 3D animation and text-to-speech technologies.

Click here to chat with Hoşsohbot!

Brain aggregation

Here's a small playground for our R&D activities: A small Q&A chatbot (chat feature coming soon) with some 83.000 questions and answers.


The answers represent a "common mind" that we love to use while populating content for our products.

So go ahead and ask the robot: http://www.robotasor.com

HRBot is already a success!

HRBot has been attracting a lot of attention both from media and prospects. Congratulations once again go to Tugba Avci, for using our support very effectively and turning it into a success story. We hope to be announcing working examples on reputable corporations very soon.

Karaoke with Selin

Our new MSN® bot Selin invites you to a karaoke session in a rich interactive application. Have fun!

HRbot is tested in a real-world-environment!

Official news agency of Turkey, "Anadolu Ajansi" recently distributed a press release of ours, announcing that HRbot was tested successfully on Bogazici University graduate students. Despite the fact that our brand was removed from the release, the impact is quite significant.

Congratulations go to our program director Tugba Avci and Software Engineer Nazmi Zorlu.

You're in the army now :)

Yedek subay sınavı is the name of the exam held to determine where gentlemen holding an undergraduate degree (or higher) will complete their military service. So, we're here to inform the candidates as soon as the results are in. Interesting service! Pretty useful, though.

Introducing the "commercial Merve": Ebru.

Our second B2C product is a variation of Merve. Ebru also aims to improve communication skills of gentlemen. Users are required to pay a flat fee of TRY 1 for each attempt. Every 200th attempt is entitled to win a brand new Nokia cellphone in return.

This is the first time we'll be making use of sweepstakes, so this is a lot of fun!

Should a user be successful on his online date with Ebru, we issue a certificate in his name, that can be printed right away, to demonstrate one's skills as a romantic gentleman. It looks something like this:

Building trust

We're about to launch a project for o.b., a Johnson&Johnson product. The brand deserves to communicate with the user in a special way and we'll be doing so, where "trust" will be our priority. We'll collect profile information and run a sampling project also.

First commercial B2C product

Gizem (Mystery) showed us that there's a huge potential in commercial consumer bots. Thanks to the power of one of the largest Facebook groups with almost 900.000 members along with a mobile payment system by the market leader GSM operator Turkcell, Gizem held more than 8000 chat sessions in less than 24 hours. We have two products: A regular 3-minute chat session and a premium service where Gizem personally deals with the user. The first one costs 2.99 TRY, where the premium sells for 19.90. This is a great success story in terms of the product, the ability to generate targeted traffic and effective integration of the mobile payment system. Our new B2C products are on the way, so stay tuned!

Introducing Yildiz, the star of Yedigun

We built a new female character named Yildiz (Star) for Yedigun, a sister company of PepsiCo. Yedigun has been organizing the annual song contest Yedigun Yildizlari (Yedigun Stars) for a couple of years now, and Yildiz helps prospective contestants with the rules and provides the tension-release they need before they shoot their video.

An exclusive offer to the readers of this blog.

I realised we have a couple of very loyal returning visitors out there who almost come back each day to check for new updates! Given that this blog has an average 20 visitors a day, i thought it wouldn't be an awful idea to offer you guys an opportunity to exclusively test our new product before the official launch date. So whether you already have a shopping experience with Hepsiburada or not, please go ahead and ask a question or two. (Please note that the bot is not responsible for recognizing product names or brands.) Your feedback would be greatly appreciated. And stay tuned for more exclusive news!

Time to spread the word. (And the product!)

We want virtual assistants to be used widely out on the web. So it's kind of a mission for us to make them available for any entity, corporate, or personal. As a part of this effort, we pre-launched the "build your own virtual assistant" tool. We set the official launch date as January 1st, and we'll be collecting valuable feedback from the beta tester community until then. Our PR monster Merve will be promoting the tool during her job, introducing it to some 1500 unique daily visitors of our website.

Although this product offers limited features compared to the Botégo-managed version, it still delivers the core elements of a virtual assistant that you can use on a personal website, blog, or even the corporate web site of an SME. In addition to the usual question&answer feature, it also functions as a guide, automatically navigating the user to the relevant page on the website (depending on the topic the question is related to) making it a really powerful tool. And it's totally free!

I had mentioned on a previous post that we collect transcripts to analyze the data they contain, in order to increase our expertise in language processing. Upon the launch of this product, that content will be of a broader and more diverse nature, since new transcripts from different sources will be pouring in, in compliance with the user agreement. So this is basicly a win-win situation. We're eager to see some working samples around the web! If you're interested in becoming a beta tester, jump into our "close beta test room" on Friendfeed.

What's wrong with the site search?

Our new viral marketing microsite brings up the question "What's wrong with the site search?" and discusses how major corporations fail with offering a decent site search tool to their clients.

http://www.aramadasorunne.com (in Turkish)

Our virtual assistant is a much more powerful tool increasing customer satisfaction while decreasing costs.

Botégo call center solution

Here's a presentation (in Turkish) that demonstrates the advantages our call center solution offers. the video is also available in WMV format at: http://www.botego.com/videos/callcentercozumu.wmv (7.09 MB)


Botégo çağrı merkezi çözümü from ekim kaya on Vimeo.

Dealing with call center queues

Here's a microsite where we demonstrate how our call center product serves as a knowledgebase and reduces the time needed for call center agents to access information.

http://www.bundanistiyoruz.com

How do you measure success?

Since we claim Botego can replace a human being (to a certain
extent), we need to support our claim. As I said in the previous
post, our aim is to satisfy the 90% of reasonable users who
understand the context in which a particular Botego application is
operating. You can't blame an engineer for not being able to comment
on a disease. The same thing applies to Botego. Botego on an online
shop is responsible for responding to enquiries regarding purchases,
delivery options, the exchange and return policies of the shop, etc.
It will not return the results of the recent election poll. Good
luck getting that information from a human sales representative!

By the way, have you had any bad experiences dealing with call center
agents? I have. During a recent conversation with one of them, she
tried to explain why they sent the invoice to the recipient although
I had clearly stated the purchased item would be shipped as a gift.
Of course, she couldn't give me a satisfactory explanation.

In short, Botego is able to deliver what she intends to, and the success of a business depends on its approach to its customers, not whether it uses Botego or humans.

A new product from Botégo: Automated e-mail responder

It took our team a couple of months to build a brand new product based on our existing technology. It's an innovative application of our proprietary algorithm. Our pattern matching technology basically detects the contents of an email message and responds accordingly. This product offers amazing possibilities for an organization handling high volumes of email traffic. Any customer support department can use the software to automatically handle the majority of the email traffic. We're looking forward to seeing how a major client uses this application in the near future.