We value all of our clients. It is also true that the larger the operation a particular client is running, the better a chance it is for us to prove the stability of our technology. So, we're proud to announce that Avea, one of the largest telecom companies of Turkey, has chosen us.
Botego will serve as a platform for a faster and more relevant way for Avea's customer rep team to access information. Botego has a lot to offer a company serving millions of customers. Since competition is tougher than ever for a company in the service sector, every single second counts, in terms of both cost and customer satisfaction.
Stay tuned for more exciting news. We still have a lot of moves to make
(*) A quote from Avea ads, expressing the relief one gains for using Avea
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Yet another press appereance for Merve
... on the respected journal of Dogan Media Group, by the respected journalist Serdar Kuzuloglu
http://www.radikal.com.tr/ek_haber.php?ek=sa&haberno=3831
http://www.radikal.com.tr/ek_haber.php?ek=sa&haberno=3831
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
The Facebook application
Now i realize it's been a long series of Merve posts, but it really has become a star application for us. As of today, Facebook community, -virtually the whole Internet community- has access to Merve via the fancy Merve Facebook app. Facebook doesn't allow us to build it in a way people can embed it to their profile pages, so it comes in an application frame.
http://apps.facebook.com/merveyitavla
I wish we had been one of the first Facebook application developers from Turkey, but it's still not too late to catch the train.
http://apps.facebook.com/merveyitavla
I wish we had been one of the first Facebook application developers from Turkey, but it's still not too late to catch the train.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Web seminars by Botègo
Introducing the "Web Seminars" we'll be hosting on various popular topics on the first Saturday of every month, starting from 8th of December.
http://www.webseminerleri.com
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Good PR, bad PR
This weekend our product had four national press appearances. One of them was Forbes Turkey, by the technology editor Ersun Erdinc, outlining the idea behind the "Merve'yi tavla" application and how it became popular. It was a follow-up for the detailed article in the September issue and was quite supportive.
The second one is a "men's" magazine named Boxer, which competes with licensed magazines such as the Turkish versions of Esquire, Men's Health and FHM. That one was funny and included actual dialogs with Merve. Boxer claimed that their readers would doubtlessly be capable of talking Merve into going on a date with them and encouraged them to give it a try.
Third one is called Marketing Turkiye. It was a modest article quoted from a press release agency. Still a good channel to promote our brand, though.
The last one was less positive. A marketing agency had created a bot project for Tefal and based it solely on Botego. The idea was to promote Tefal products to women during a conversation. The agency came up with the idea, created the interface, and sold it to Tefal, but Botego was the heart (from an engineering point of view, the "engine") of the project.
To our surprise, the related article published in Fortune Turkey was written as though the marketing agency had manufactured the whole thing and was able to create any kind of bot (which is not correct). The article did not mention Botego at all. When we discussed our concerns with a board member from the agency, we were told they had not intended to present the project as entirely their own creation. We still have not figured out how the miscommunication happened.
Incidents of misinformation cannot always be prevented, so it is important we swiftly address them in order to preserve our brand value.
The second one is a "men's" magazine named Boxer, which competes with licensed magazines such as the Turkish versions of Esquire, Men's Health and FHM. That one was funny and included actual dialogs with Merve. Boxer claimed that their readers would doubtlessly be capable of talking Merve into going on a date with them and encouraged them to give it a try.
Third one is called Marketing Turkiye. It was a modest article quoted from a press release agency. Still a good channel to promote our brand, though.
The last one was less positive. A marketing agency had created a bot project for Tefal and based it solely on Botego. The idea was to promote Tefal products to women during a conversation. The agency came up with the idea, created the interface, and sold it to Tefal, but Botego was the heart (from an engineering point of view, the "engine") of the project.
To our surprise, the related article published in Fortune Turkey was written as though the marketing agency had manufactured the whole thing and was able to create any kind of bot (which is not correct). The article did not mention Botego at all. When we discussed our concerns with a board member from the agency, we were told they had not intended to present the project as entirely their own creation. We still have not figured out how the miscommunication happened.
Incidents of misinformation cannot always be prevented, so it is important we swiftly address them in order to preserve our brand value.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Now you can embed "Merve" to your own website!
All you need to do is add the following line to your HTML code, and Merve is up and running on your website!
Monday, October 22, 2007
Trying to hook up with Merve
It's been a while since my last post. We've been busy building new Botego applications. Our hard work has paid off, too: despite still being beta, our last offering has become quite popular.
Merve (a common female name in Turkish) is a 25-year-old, well-educated, liberal and urban lady from Izmir. The mission of this imaginary character is to help men learn how to approach women. Guys simply take their best shot in an effort to talk Merve into going on a date with them. The nicer you are, the better your chances are. If you're good enough, you can get a date from her. But don't even think of being rude to her, as she'll immediately start ignoring you.
The figures are impressive. As of today, *59,084* dialogs took place. The application was mentioned on over 468 referring websites more than 123.000 times. 42,368 people visited the website, generating 144,156 pageviews. At peak hours, Merve handled 35 dialogs per minute, simultaneously. The average length of a chat session was 10 minutes. That means viewers spent a total of 9847 hours (410 days) viewing the website. All of that happened in less than one week!
That's a solid example of how Botego can create awareness and generate new and repeat website traffic when it is combined with a promising concept.
Merve (a common female name in Turkish) is a 25-year-old, well-educated, liberal and urban lady from Izmir. The mission of this imaginary character is to help men learn how to approach women. Guys simply take their best shot in an effort to talk Merve into going on a date with them. The nicer you are, the better your chances are. If you're good enough, you can get a date from her. But don't even think of being rude to her, as she'll immediately start ignoring you.
The figures are impressive. As of today, *59,084* dialogs took place. The application was mentioned on over 468 referring websites more than 123.000 times. 42,368 people visited the website, generating 144,156 pageviews. At peak hours, Merve handled 35 dialogs per minute, simultaneously. The average length of a chat session was 10 minutes. That means viewers spent a total of 9847 hours (410 days) viewing the website. All of that happened in less than one week!
That's a solid example of how Botego can create awareness and generate new and repeat website traffic when it is combined with a promising concept.
Monday, September 17, 2007
I love progress!
I really do...I can't get enough of it. I remember the day we first signed the lease for our office, which was not long ago. (I will tell you the short history of our startup in a future post.) What I had in my mind on that day was a draft of the concept. We're still at a very early stage, but we already have a decent V2.0 plan. In fact, we have executed part of it for one of our clients and called it V1.5.
In a previous post, I said content is more important than the algorithm in terms of the impact to our success. The first major improvement to the algorithm is on the way, and when we're done Botego will move onto the next level, which I call the first step of advancement.
If you're into progress, you're probably inclined to dislike your previous practices. I find this a very healthy approach. I remember improving my score by 25% on the nationwide college examination on my second attempt. I had realized my first try was way too courageous considering how little I was prepared. That's exactly what I feel these days: I'm never satisfied with what we already have in our hands.
In a previous post, I said content is more important than the algorithm in terms of the impact to our success. The first major improvement to the algorithm is on the way, and when we're done Botego will move onto the next level, which I call the first step of advancement.
If you're into progress, you're probably inclined to dislike your previous practices. I find this a very healthy approach. I remember improving my score by 25% on the nationwide college examination on my second attempt. I had realized my first try was way too courageous considering how little I was prepared. That's exactly what I feel these days: I'm never satisfied with what we already have in our hands.
Our third press appearance
Is it really artificial intelligence?
A lot of people have asked this question. There are many definitions of AI, and the correct answer depends on the application. For example, here is one definition:
"The ability of a computer to perform tasks, such as reasoning and learning, that human intelligence is capable of doing"
Botego does learn, but the learning process for this commercial software has to be human-controlled. Consider the alternative: if Botego independently uses the information based on statistical analysis of user input, it could easily be mistaken. Remember how Google bombers manipulated search results using the partially-disclosed Google pagerank algorithm? For a product like Botego serving in customer relations, such an incident is unacceptable. With such possibilities in mind, we chose to limit the "intelligence" of Botego, to a certain extent.
Here are two more descriptions of AI which also apply to Botego:
"A generic term commonly used to indicate the inclusion in software of some type of automated application of rules, the results of which give the appearance of 'intelligence' on the part of the computer. An example would be a computer which uses language rules to carry on a conversation with the human using the computer."
"Computational techniques to automate tasks that require human intelligence and the ability to reason."
The terms "intelligence", "learn", and "think" in these definitions are usually in quotes. That seems to be an acknowledgment of the limits of artificial intelligence. But we don't care about the limits. As long as you achieve the expected outcome, it doesn't matter whether you succeed on the Turing Test
If you're a scientist who has spent decades on the science of AI, you're free to call our technology "simple pattern matching". Fair enough. Just be advised that our goal is to satisfy the 90% of what we call "reasonable users*", and so far this goal is accomplished.
Our technology depends 40% on the algorithm and 60% on the content. So even if it was only the content we cared for (which is not the case, as we are improving our algorithm), a 200% increase in our content database would result in a 120% increase in the total success of the application. That improvement is impressive and very easy to achieve!
* Anyone who is aware that Botego is a software tool that doesn't claim to know everything.
"The ability of a computer to perform tasks, such as reasoning and learning, that human intelligence is capable of doing"
Botego does learn, but the learning process for this commercial software has to be human-controlled. Consider the alternative: if Botego independently uses the information based on statistical analysis of user input, it could easily be mistaken. Remember how Google bombers manipulated search results using the partially-disclosed Google pagerank algorithm? For a product like Botego serving in customer relations, such an incident is unacceptable. With such possibilities in mind, we chose to limit the "intelligence" of Botego, to a certain extent.
Here are two more descriptions of AI which also apply to Botego:
"A generic term commonly used to indicate the inclusion in software of some type of automated application of rules, the results of which give the appearance of 'intelligence' on the part of the computer. An example would be a computer which uses language rules to carry on a conversation with the human using the computer."
"Computational techniques to automate tasks that require human intelligence and the ability to reason."
The terms "intelligence", "learn", and "think" in these definitions are usually in quotes. That seems to be an acknowledgment of the limits of artificial intelligence. But we don't care about the limits. As long as you achieve the expected outcome, it doesn't matter whether you succeed on the Turing Test
If you're a scientist who has spent decades on the science of AI, you're free to call our technology "simple pattern matching". Fair enough. Just be advised that our goal is to satisfy the 90% of what we call "reasonable users*", and so far this goal is accomplished.
Our technology depends 40% on the algorithm and 60% on the content. So even if it was only the content we cared for (which is not the case, as we are improving our algorithm), a 200% increase in our content database would result in a 120% increase in the total success of the application. That improvement is impressive and very easy to achieve!
* Anyone who is aware that Botego is a software tool that doesn't claim to know everything.
What is Botégo?
Technology is the key element for serving profitability and competitiveness, and innovative companies keep creating new tools for this challenging task. Our company, Yapayzeki Ltd.—our name may be translated “artificial intelligent”—created Botego (short for “Bot with an Ego”, referring to her ability to learn and advance quickly). Botego offers a new approach to various disciplines, such as customer relations management, marketing, human resources and entertainment.
A bot is software used to automate certain tasks and procedures. A good example would be Google’s spiders, responsible for automatically browsing websites to create an up-to-date index. Botego is designed to interact with people in a human-like way. The context and attitude of the interaction are solely determined by our clients in order to serve their efforts to create a better customer experience.
This unique platform based on our technology, along with our expertise on content, makes us a great partner for any type and size of business. And this blog is what this is all about. Add it to your favorites and check it out once in a while
A bot is software used to automate certain tasks and procedures. A good example would be Google’s spiders, responsible for automatically browsing websites to create an up-to-date index. Botego is designed to interact with people in a human-like way. The context and attitude of the interaction are solely determined by our clients in order to serve their efforts to create a better customer experience.
This unique platform based on our technology, along with our expertise on content, makes us a great partner for any type and size of business. And this blog is what this is all about. Add it to your favorites and check it out once in a while
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
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.
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.
Friday, May 11, 2007
We have a winner!
The newest member of our software team, Semih Balkanci made us proud on the Imagine Cup, an organization by Microsoft. Considering the following quote from Bill Gates, one can tell that this is no ordinary "student software competition":
"I wish there had been an Imagine Cup when I was growing up. It gets people involved in seeing that software is changing the world"
Semih's team won the first round of the competition held in Turkey and they'll be representing our country in Paris.
Way to go Semih!
"I wish there had been an Imagine Cup when I was growing up. It gets people involved in seeing that software is changing the world"
Semih's team won the first round of the competition held in Turkey and they'll be representing our country in Paris.
Way to go Semih!
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
25.000.000
Number of questions Botégo has answered so far, has reached a whopping amount mentioned on the title. The figure itself represents a significant know-how, and there's more to this asset than the quantity. It offers a precious medium for data-mining, that we constantly use to develop the product.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
A new client
It's been quite a series of posts, and yet to come... We're proud to announce that our clientele now also includes TEB, a partner of BNP BARIPAS, (sixth largest bank in the world, and the largest one in the Euro region). We'll be serving TEB with our knowledgebase tool, offering an efficient way to reach information.
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Google Online Marketing Challenge
A team participating on the Google Online Marketing Challenge has chosen Botégo as their partner on the project. We approved numerous ads for the campaign they'll be running during the challenge.
They have interesting strategies such as using names of more than 50 call center executives as keywords. Here's how it looks... Brilliant idea!
Sunday, April 29, 2007
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.
Monday, April 23, 2007
"Free wednesday"
The weather is now so warm that, even our air conditioned office sometimes lacks the convenience we require. So we occasionally hit the street to find a better workplace. As i work on this post, the core team is enjoying their Mocha's and the fact that only a young internet company can offer such an opportunity.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
2008 summer internship applications are now closed
We were invited to Yildiz Tech for a two-hour presentation based solely on Merve, but i had the opportunity to discuss chatbots in general, offering the participants a broader perspective. It was nice to see a lot of bright individuals asking for internship opportunities at Botégo.
We're now a proud sponsor of Webrazzi, known as "the Techcrunch of Turkey"
Thursday, March 29, 2007
A picture is worth a thousand words.
We're holding regular meetings each Friday where we have intensive discussions with the motive of improving our technology and planning our next moves. This is how our whiteboard looks like following a typical meeting.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Botègo supports innovation
We're proud to sponsor an event supporting innovative e-business projects: e-fikrim.
Also in news: We co-sponsored İTÜ Sözlük's birthday event where lots of people got to test the product. And here is an interview on turk.internet.com, courtesy of Mrs. Fusun Nebil
Also in news: We co-sponsored İTÜ Sözlük's birthday event where lots of people got to test the product. And here is an interview on turk.internet.com, courtesy of Mrs. Fusun Nebil
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Some more press appearance
Articles mentioning Merve on Digital Age, Sabah Cumartesi and Günaydın. And a low-quality video of the news story on Channel 24. As a result, a Google query for the term "Merve'yi tavla" now returns even more results.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
You can't think outside "our box"
This is a subset of various expressions standing for "Ne haber?" ("What's up?" in Turkish), including virtually every typo you can imagine.
Now that Botego handles more than 50 cumulative dialogs a minute, we've become quite an expert on how our people's minds operate, including how they fail to operate correctly. The total number of conversations has reached the millions, bringing the volume of logs to a whopping amount of gigabytes. Therefore, we no longer need to foresee such variations, as our valuable users have been voluntarily contributing to our database. All we need to do is analyse it with the proprietary software we recently developed. So, you can try out any typo you can imagine, and we'll immediately add it to our list, if we already haven't.
If one of our biggest assets for building innovative products is creativity, the other one is the expertise we've gained from operating those products.
Monday, January 15, 2007
Helping Turk Telekom help their customers
Turk Telekom is the incumbent telecom operator in Turkey and has been majority-owned by Saudi Oger Telecom, which acquired a 55% stake from the Turkish government for USD 6.55 billion. As of 30 June 2006, the company had approximately 18.9 million fixed lines. Turk Telekom is also a leading provider of DSL services to both residential and business customers, and of leased lines to business customers. For the year ending on 31 December 2005, Turk Telekom had revenues of TRY 7,478 million. Considering these figures, one realizes Turk Telekom has a very large customer base. And now they're *our* customer.
Earlier today, a Botego application we developed for Turk Telekom was featured on their website with a banner which boldly stated "24/7 online customer support" and reported more than 7000 dialogs were recorded in the first couple of hours. We consider the first 10000 dialogs as the pilot dialogs, because they help us see how accurately we forecasted the content the application would need to cover. At this stage I can tell we're pretty successful at addressing the inquiries regarding matters such as DSL issues, tariffs and applications. In more than 500 dialogs, users were redirected to the TTNet call center, a separate entity who has been responsible for DSL operations for quite some time. (Most customers apparently are not aware of that, and they keep calling the Turk Telekom call center for DSL-related issues.) So we're proud to announce that we've already met the expectation of reducing call center costs on the very first day of our operation. As the name "Bot with an ego" implies, we will get better and better each day, so stay tuned for more success stories!
Earlier today, a Botego application we developed for Turk Telekom was featured on their website with a banner which boldly stated "24/7 online customer support" and reported more than 7000 dialogs were recorded in the first couple of hours. We consider the first 10000 dialogs as the pilot dialogs, because they help us see how accurately we forecasted the content the application would need to cover. At this stage I can tell we're pretty successful at addressing the inquiries regarding matters such as DSL issues, tariffs and applications. In more than 500 dialogs, users were redirected to the TTNet call center, a separate entity who has been responsible for DSL operations for quite some time. (Most customers apparently are not aware of that, and they keep calling the Turk Telekom call center for DSL-related issues.) So we're proud to announce that we've already met the expectation of reducing call center costs on the very first day of our operation. As the name "Bot with an ego" implies, we will get better and better each day, so stay tuned for more success stories!
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