Explaining to my family on Thanksgiving what Botcopy does has never been easy. Wish me luck.
By: Rob Lubow
Tags: Chatbots, Botcopy, AI, Dialogflow, Bots

As we go into the holidays, we at Botcopy wish you health, a sense of gratitude, and lots of love.

2020 has been a confusing year for all of us, and the last thing my family needs is more confusion. For the past few years, on Thanksgiving, my family’s been asking me what Botcopy does. No matter how I’ve struggled to explain, nobody at home quite understands what we do. It’s my fault.

“Wait, so you write chatbots?” “No.” “You program the machine learning?“ “No.” “Fine, whatever, let’s eat.”

Here’s why Botcopy is hard to explain to some people.

People know what chatbot designers do. Most understand what a chatbot platform is if you explain it. You can even tell people about AI frameworks, more or less. But Botcopy occupies a unique part of the puzzle. We’re none of the above, and yet we touch all those things. That’s been a blessing but it can be a curse trying to explain it to family on Thanksgiving.

What the heck does our company do?

To warm up the crowd this year (and stall), I’ll start by dropping impressive-sounding stats.

(The below stats are accurate, but you can’t glean much in terms of actual revenue; the stats are merely to rev up the crowd before explaining what we do, such that they aren’t bored to tears. We’re thankful we have revenue growth during this crazy year.)

Botcopy is growing. Our software was sending around 10,000 messages/month this time last year. Now it sends around 50,000,000 messages/month. Recently, it’s been growing at around 20% per month.

Our software was sending around 10,000 messages/month this time last year. Now it sends around 50,000,000 messages/month. Recently, it’s been growing at around 20% per month. We have thousands of customers. Many are big global companies whose names you know. We cover pretty much every sector of business, education, and government.

Many are big global companies whose names you know. We cover pretty much every sector of business, education, and government. We’re Google Cloud Partners. We have a Better Business Bureau A rating. Our target market manages to find us, and we get on swimmingly with them.

We have a Better Business Bureau A rating. Our target market manages to find us, and we get on swimmingly with them. This somehow happened without fundraising or spending a single dollar on advertising.

“But what the heck does Botcopy do?”

Okay, no more stalling. Let’s give this a try. So there are these things called chatbots that can live on websites.

Just imagine a square within a square. It’s not hard.

A good chatbot on a website can handle some customer service, sales, lead generation, even transactions. It can pick up some of the slack, get people the answers they need, boost engagement, and cut costs.

“Oh, I’ve seen chatbots on websites. I wouldn’t say I like those. Does anyone? Pass the mashed potatoes.” — Unnamed family member who is my brother

Okay, it’s true that a decent amount of bots are not acceptable. But they’re getting better fast. Conversational AI is starting to demonstrate real return on investment. Some of our customers have achieved a 98 percent accuracy level – meaning their bots answer questions correctly 98 percent of the time. Many companies, schools, governments, want smart chatbots on their websites and are willing to invest significant time and resources for this.

No Grandpa, Botcopy doesn’t design and write these bots.

Our customers, or the agencies they hire, do the writing and design. What Botcopy provides is some essential software that helps to get the job done. But let’s back up a bit. You need to understand that a bot has a FRONT PART and a BACK PART. (I’ll try to dumb this down as much as possible.)

The front part is the part the user sees and deals with directly.

The front part (or UI) includes the actual chat window and any branding elements. Plus all the stuff in the chat window. Things like chat bubbles, buttons, cards, carousels. All the things you see. (Or hear; if the bot is in voice mode.)

The UI is also the stuff that “sees” you in the sense that it’s where you type in your questions, where you click its buttons, and it can even respond intelligently to your website behavior.

The back part is the bot’s brain.

If you ask the UI a question, how does it know the answer? That’s where the back part, or the AI, comes in. (And the outside servers and apps that your AI can pull from or store to if needed.)

The AI is a codebase with the bot’s “brains,” for lack of a better word. To get these brains set up correctly, someone has to go in and arrange this back part (AI) so that the front part can not look like an idiot.

The UI needs to grab info from various places in the AI and show it to the bot’s end-user, OR take info the end-user types into the UI and send or store it to somewhere in the back part. Make sense? Good.

But here’s a problem.

Often, the companies that sell the front part also force you to use their tech for their back parts. This constraint can be not very pleasant because some companies are good at making front parts, and some are good at making back parts. Very few, if any, are good at creating both, in our opinion.

Ideally, in a perfect world, you’d take the best UI and match it with the best AI. You’d think this would be easy, right? Well, if this were Thanksgiving 2018, it would not be so easy. This is why we created Botcopy: To make the best UI in such a way that it instantly connects with the best AI.

Back when we were a chatbot design firm, we fell in love with a company that offered an outstanding AI framework.

It’s a quaint little company you might have heard of called Google.

At the time, Google’s AI framework (Dialogflow) had a brilliant AI engine, but not-so-good front part for web chat, in our humble (and correct) opinion.

However, we liked the direction of the front parts of some other companies like Intercom and Drift, but they didn’t have good back parts, again, in our humble opinion. Their AI was kind of primitive compared to Google’s. (Which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. It’s Google.)

But such was the world in 2018 for some odd reason. The sad reality was if you picked a UI you liked, you had to live with the back-end functionality from that same company mostly and vice versa; if you selected a back-end AI engine you liked, you were stuck with a Facebook Messenger bot on your web site, or some other UI that left much to be desired. Like it or not, that was the situation. Case closed. The end.

Well, there was another option.

The other option was to build a custom front-end and connect it to the back part you liked, but that was a complex and expensive odyssey. It was scary-hard for anyone except a seasoned front-end developer who magically knew how to create custom middleware that integrated with major NLU frameworks. (Just typing that sentence gives me a headache.) In any case, this unmet need was preventing many companies from launching brilliant website chatbots that could automate tasks, prove ROI, and save millions in the process.

We had dozens of big clients in 2018 who wanted very smart bots on their websites. When we’d tell them the limitations, or the price of a custom front-end integration, it was a deal-breaker. Something had to be done quickly.

Botcopy pivoted to software, and we made a UI that worked with the best AI.

Getting our UI to sync up with Google Cloud Dialogflow took a lot of work and perseverance. We had to build an API, a robust portal to manage all the bots, connections, integrations, and front-end design tweaks, and a ton of other cool stuff that’s maybe a little too non-family-friendly to mention here.

Point being, you now have the genius of Google’s AI combined with Botcopy’s elegant and easy-to-use front-end UI that can be added to your website in a click and customized to look how you want it to, without writing a line of code. And instead of paying a zillion dollars for a custom solution, our plans start at $19.

It’s kind of hard to believe that nothing existed to connect a great web chat UI to the best conversational AI engine in the world. But it didn’t, so we built it, it’s called Botcopy, and that’s what Botcopy does. We recently released Botcopy 2.0 with many new features, and now integrate with Dialogflow CX, and are working on more integrations for 2021, including Microsoft and Rasa.

Got it? Thank goodness. Let’s eat.