The Drop is our monthly update that highlights new features and recent enhancements we’ve made to the platform, so you can easily stay informed on what’s new in Smooch. Here’s what we launched in January.
It’s been a big month! Our Product & Engineering teams have been heads down in planning mode working on some key projects we’re sure you’ll find exciting. We released a report on the State of Messaging in 2018, leading the way for the upcoming launch of our new industry newsletter. New guides were shipped to help you get started on building your own custom UI for each of our SDKs. We also got the chance to deliver a keynote at Chatbot Summit in Tel Aviv this week, where we launched our new offer for bot makers. Finally, we’re excited to introduce our newest integration partner, Botanalytics.
What’s new 🎉
New report: The State of Messaging 2018
2017 was a big year in messaging. Chatbots surged. Voice assistants spoke up. Conversational commerce came of age. We kicked off the year by asking 17 experts from leading software companies like Oracle, Lithium, Sparkcentral, Slack, Drift and Uber to reflect on the past year and share their messaging predictions for the year ahead. Check out the report.
Smooch at Chatbot Summit: Announcing Smooch for Bots
Global leaders in messaging, bots and conversational interfaces descended on Tel Aviv this week for the third annual Chatbot Summit. IBM, Google, Oracle, LivePerson, Genesys, SAP, Amdocs, HP, Lenovo, Vonage, Deutsche Telekom and over 1,000 participants came together to share, discuss and debate the future of conversational computing.
Our Co-Founder and CTO, Mike Gozzo, delivered a keynote address on the future of messaging platforms. While it’s easy to get caught up in the latest technology advances, Mike reminded the audience that if conversational technology is to reach its potential, it won’t be about the bots, or the AI, or the voice interfaces, but rather will have to be about us, the people, the users of this technology. Read more about his talk here.
Chatbot Summit was the perfect occasion for us to launch our brand new offering for bot makers. Smooch for Bots enables bot companies to instantly deploy their bots wherever users are. Whether that’s on the most popular chat apps, mobile apps and web messengers or SMS. Smooch for Bots empowers bot makers to:
- Reach more customers by being wherever users are, regardless of channel;
- Leverage each messaging channel’s best native features to optimize the user experience;
- Orchestrate and integrate bot conversations with helpdesks, live chat, CRMs and other enterprise systems;
- Bring contextual awareness to every interaction with access to historical conversation records and user profile metadata.
Build your own custom UI with Smooch’s SDKs
Each Smooch SDK comes with a pre-built UI that you can configure using the Smooch Dashboard or the REST API. But if you want, you can also completely replace Smooch's default UI with your own. If you want to move down that path, take a look at our new guides and code samples for our Web, iOS and Android SDKs to get started.
New integration partner: Botanalytics
Botanalytics is a conversational analytics tool focused on analyzing engagement and retention metrics for chatbots. It’s available for bots on many channels, including Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Line, Viber, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Twilio SMS and more.
Discover bottlenecks, identify your most engaged (and churned) users, and watch conversations unfold along the way. With comprehensive, visualized data at your fingertips, you can gain key insights about how well your bot is performing—and how it can get even better. Visit our integration directory to learn more.
Industry intelligence 📰
Get The Message
😏 Pssst! Our brand new editorial newsletter, The Message, is just about to launch. It will cover the rapidly-evolving state of messaging, bots and conversational commerce and will be packed with original insights, the latest industry research and a little experimentation. Watch your inbox in February for a special preview of the first edition and sign up for The Message if you like what you see!
New projects on our drawing board 👀
Our Product & Engineering teams are in full-on planning mode these days. Here’s our short list of potential projects:
- Configure and send canned messages (handy for hard to craft messages like carousels)
- Bring your own messaging channel to Smooch
- Allow SDK users to have multiple conversation threads
- Enable user-to-user conversations on Smooch SDKs
- Allow businesses to join group conversations on social chat apps
- Allow bots to join conversations in group chat apps like Slack, Cisco Spark and Microsoft Teams
If any of these projects resonate with you, we’d like to hear from you. Register your interest here and let us know about your specific use case.