2017 had been a great year at Gupshup

2017 had been a great year for chatbots. Facebook added new features, Twitter opened up access to Direct Message (DM) APIs, WhatsApp started testing its platform through verified Business accounts. All this coupled with the biggest brands and businesses creating chatbots to handle use cases including but not limited to customer service, marketing, subscriptions and a variety of engagement activities.

While the chatbot industry grew by leaps and bounds, Gupshup as a chatbot development platform kept up with the trend. In 2017, we made significant  improvements to our platform, let’s quickly glance at a few of them.

Interbot as a channel

In 2017, Gupshup launched it’s Interbot channel that enables bot-to-bot communication and allows bots to freely communicate with one another. Using the Interbot channel, bots can collaborate with each other to enable new services. Chatbots developed outside Gupshup can also be published on Interbot channel and used by developers. Although Interbot channel is currently in Beta state, it will have a great impact on the industry in the coming years.

Check out Interbot  website for more information.

New cloud-based IDE with scripting tool

Gupshup has been pioneering tools for chatbot development even before the world was introduced to the concept and the cloud-based IDE for development is one for them. When we launched the platform in 2016, we had a one file IDE that had its fair share of limitations. In 2017, we completely redesigned our cloud-based IDE to provide developers the flexibility and the best coding experience.

Some of the new features added are:

• Multifile support
• Inbuilt NLP with the scripting tool
• Node package manager
• Git integration
• Inbuilt testing widget for local testing
• Automatic hosting, monitoring, and tracking

The new IDE is tightly coupled with the scripting tool which allows anyone to map out conversation paths between a bot and a user, without the need for any coding knowledge. The user’s conversation has auto-NLP enabled that matches it to the closest intent specified in the script file.

Explore the new IDE here.

New and improved Flow Bot Builder

The new Flow Bot Builder makes it super easy to create a chatbot without the need for any coding skills. This product enables you to create fully functional chatbots and publishes them to a host of messaging channels within minutes. You can enable rich media content in the chatbot too.

Some of the features of the Flow Bot Builder are:

• Code free bot development
• Tree view for easy access to the bot flow
• Modularisation support for bot flows
• Seamlessly Integrated with Gupshup’s NLP framework
• Provides hosting of the media contents
• Built-in testing tool
• Automatic hosting, monitoring, and tracking

The best feature of the Flow Bot Builder is that it’s tightly coupled with the IDE Bot Builder. Hence, you can develop your bot flow and then switch to IDE bot builder to add advanced features, enable third-party integrations to your bot.

You can explore more about Flow Bot Builder here.

Mindbody template

Mindbody is one of the biggest cloud-based business management software for the wellness services industry in the world, serving about 35 million consumers located in over 130 countries. It provides business management software and online scheduling platforms for over 58,000 health and wellness businesses globally.

Gupshup has built an integration with the Mindbody system allowing businesses to launch an appointment scheduling chatbot in a jiffy. Business owners need to link their Mindbody account to the chatbot and the chatbot will be ready to be used on Facebook messenger, website or app. A user can then schedule an appointment using the chatbot with the preferred staff and time. Businesses will be notified through email and on the Mindbody dashboard. Users are also sent reminders and confirmation details through the chatbot.

Explore the Mind-Body Template here.

Twitter DM support

Around May 2017 Twitter opened up access to Direct Message (DM) APIs to enable brands and businesses to engage with their audience with rich and engaging experiences. With the new DM APIs Twitter started supporting quick replies which are like text with options for users to choose from.

We at Gupshup added the support for the new DM APIs on our platform using which you can create an engaging chatbot with suggested responses and rich media contents.

Facebook Workplace integration

In 2017 Gupshup added support for publishing a chatbot on Workplace.

Facebook’s Workplace is a collaborative platform which can be used to communicate with groups and improve collaboration between colleagues by bringing social network features in a corporate environment. It offers many features and one of them is automating different tasks through bots. For an instance, a chatbot can be used to send important reminders or notifications about meetings or other activities.

Hence using Gupshup makes it easier to create a 1 to 1 chatbot on Workplace.

Along with these in 2017 we at Gupshup also added support for MS Teams as a channel, dashbot.io as an analytics platform, new Facebook features like Parametric codes, Message tags etc. and many more.

2018 is going to be another revolutionary year as we all will witness big transformations in messaging industry. We at Gupshup are excited to support the growing needs of the messaging industry by providing one-stop solutions for everyone.