Tubitak support to our R&D activities

Tubitak recently issued a grant to Botego, as an acknowledgement of our R&D efforts. The amount we'll be receiving represents the fullest extent permitted by the law. We're flattered, and and feel obligated to set the bar even higher.

Events and demos

I just wanted to share a couple of events (our open-source vision in "Ozgur Yazilim Gunleri", and Natural Language Processing (in Turkish) technology in Webrazzi 3.0 event) we have attended (and will be attending), and three demo files as an update.

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

Women-dominated team with no real women in the office

Interesting approach from Duygu Sayiner, a Platin correspondent mentioning that various "virtual female agents" (Merve, Aslı, Gizem, Selin, Bilge...) are handling all the business Botego does.

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.

Interesting referral statistics for Botego.com

The ratio of US-origined visitors is higher than one would expect, given the fact that most of our daily visitors are visiting Merve.

Karaoke with Selin

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

Another case study: Number of "ob.com.tr" visitors was increased 31 times!!!

You might want to take a look at this press release mentioning the key results of the Johnson&Johnson campaign.

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.

Information is power

Millions of queries allow Google to offer this great feature where it spots certain typos.



I had mentioned that we have been collecting a decent amount of conversation data in two and a half years, and explained how we made use of this database.

I was hoping for a case where this database alone could convert into business. Last month a digital agency purchased a small subset of the database. They will be using it on a project where young internet users -who usually don't care about the grammar a lot- will be expected to submit some names in order to succeed on a digital game. So, the application will be typo-tolerant, thanks to Botégo.

I love the idea of monetary gain through experiential and informational knowledge.

A case study: Avea

Avea has been a Botégo customer since November 2007, and the product has been used intensively since January, 2008. They recently released a report revealing the benefits they've been gaining in this 1,5-year operation. The figures are as we expected.

765.779 units of content have been used by Avea dealers and call center agents.

Botégo has earned Avea an average of 6 seconds per interaction on their customer inquiry tracking system.

With a usage ratio of 50%, average time saved is 15.000 min/month, and 120.121 min. in annual gross.

Botégo has been used on 67% of all customer inquiries, and has reduced the number of total tickets opened, by 29%!

Preparation of customer inquiry tracking templates take 6 seconds less when Botégo is used.

These are a selection of various tangible advantages from the report. We'll be announcing many more with a press release soon.

Business & pleasure

I'll be representing Tele.com.tr Magazine at the Webby Awards, followed by a couple of visits to VC offices located in lovely New York City. Although i consider both tasks as pleasures, should i manage to make a good pitch, the second one might as well convert into a business. So, we can start a long journey through the Wall Street.

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:

Two new college visits

I really enjoy addressing college students and sharing my experience with them. Last week i was with Dokuz Eylul and Istanbul Ticaret University students. If you'd like me to speak at one of your events, please feel free to ask!