Botégo Blog

Information is power

2009-06-27T02:53:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-12T23:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-08T18:28:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-05-30T05:19:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-23T04:26:00.000-07:00

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!

Some news

2009-05-12T05:35:00.000-07:00

1- I had the opportunity to adress Bogazici University students at the "Bilişen" event.
2- We're delighted to have been short listed by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the "Hizli Balik Awards".
3- Gizem will be hitting the 10.000 session remark today. Second B2C project is on the way. We're excited!

Building trust

2009-04-29T04:35:00.000-07:00

We're about to launch a project for o.b., a Johnson&Johnson product. The brand deserves to communicate with the user in a special way and we'll be doing so, where "trust" will be our priority. We'll collect profile information and run a sampling project also.

First commercial B2C product

2009-04-17T03:00:00.000-07:00

Gizem (Mystery) showed us that there's a huge potential in commercial consumer bots. Thanks to the power of one of the largest Facebook groups with almost 900.000 members along with a mobile payment system by the market leader GSM operator Turkcell, Gizem held more than 8000 chat sessions in less than 24 hours. We have two products: A regular 3-minute chat session and a premium service where Gizem personally deals with the user. The first one costs 2.99 TRY, where the premium sells for 19.90. This is a great success story in terms of the product, the ability to generate targeted traffic and effective integration of the mobile payment system. Our new B2C products are on the way, so stay tuned!

Another press coverage

2009-04-05T23:45:00.000-07:00

HRBot was featured on Iste Insan, courtesy of Onur Uysal

Yet another article

2009-03-23T02:31:00.000-07:00

A modest article on Hurriyet, written from a recent press release of ours.

ISA's are the future of the web. Don't take our word for it! (You might want to take MIT's, though)

2009-03-12T14:56:00.000-07:00

Technology Review, published by MIT, lists "Intelligent Software Assistants" among "10 Emerging Technologies of 2009". We couldn't agree more.

Check it out: http://www.technologyreview.com/specialreports/specialreport.aspx?id=37

(Notice how successful they were predicting the ones back in 2001)

Update: Here's the related press release

Get a promotion!

2009-03-03T15:07:00.000-08:00

Our fourth microsite is addressing those suffering from the consequences of the economic crisis. We advise that Botégo will help them stand out in their team and have the attention of their bosses who expect them to:

Increase sales (with our characters creating the WOMM effect)

Reduce costs (with our intelligent personal agents reducing customer service load)

Increase customer satisfaction (with the same agents helping customers find what they want, when they want, without having to deal with annoying call center queues)

Work more efficiently (with our knowledgebase tools that prevent unefficient forms of interaction)

Work with the right people (with the new released product, the "HRBot"

Here how it looks:

Introducing Yildiz, the star of Yedigun

2009-02-27T16:20:00.000-08:00

We built a new female character named Yildiz (Star) for Yedigun, a sister company of PepsiCo. Yedigun has been organizing the annual song contest Yedigun Yildizlari (Yedigun Stars) for a couple of years now, and Yildiz helps prospective contestants with the rules and provides the tension-release they need before they shoot their video.

Yazboz: A great web of interrelated keywords

2009-02-07T06:09:00.000-08:00

The first time i saw Yazboz, i remember thinking "one day, this database will be worth millions of dollars". The idea is simple: "Building the relational web of every word in the dictionary."

The task of coding the complex algorithms behind the technology, encouraging people to manually map the connections between nodes in common sense, and keeping the data clean and accurate is far from easy, though. So, even in relatively early stage of the project, Can Altineller and Ozgur Oktay, two bright people behind the project deserve a lot of credit. The only way to handle this labor-intense task could be through cleverly designing the flow, so that people would enjoy what they're doing, and they did so by positioning the project as a web-based game.

No matter which language you deal with, this database is a very important asset now, given that we're in the beggining of a whole new era, that will revolutionalize the way the web works, thanks to semantic technologies. By the way, Can has worked on various other interesting projects, so don't forget to check out his website.

So the news is; Can and Ozgur had announced that developers could use their API to use the Yazboz data in their projects. Botégo is the first company to use the API in a commercial manner. But since our product requires 100% accuracy in terms of content, this is kind of an exclusive partnership where we'll be using not only the content, but also the technology to keep it clean while it keeps expanding each day.

The concrete result of this partnership will be available to users on our next project we're building for an international soda company. I'm so excited for having the opportunity, and i would like to thank Yazboz team on behalf of ours.

"Bring me fifty fantastic transcripts!"

2009-02-05T06:09:00.000-08:00

Our senior (referring not to his age but his experience) software engineer Çağatay builds some gadgets we use in order to develop new products (and also have fun) in his spare time. What you see on the screenshot is the result of a query for the word "fantastic" in our database, returning 50 results as requested. (Disclaimer: Some might find the content inappropriate as it includes the entries from Merve's transcripts.) You can do the same for the words as unusual as "scholastic", "pretentious" and "hybrid".

The tool functions as a platform for our R&D activities, and the content represents the asset we've built so far.

Playing with the words is what we basically do, and it is a lot of fun!

We won the "most creative new" reward

2009-01-29T12:27:00.000-08:00

We, along with the content provider Es Egitim were honored by "Dogan Yayin Holding" for a bot we recently built for high school students, guiding them on their way to the college.

How we help, who we help

2009-01-25T03:47:00.001-08:00

Now that we have a modest amount of followers in the international web community, i'd like to give some information as to what we do, what our intentions are, and what we have accomplished so far, in the first 22 months of our operation.

Our proprietary technology has been developed from scratch. We gained significant know-how on applications what Wikipedia calls "Weak Artificial Intelligence".

How we help

Virtual intelligent agents: These agents interact with users in a human-like way, helping them retrieve information in an informal, quick and easy way. They operate on the web, on instant messaging platforms and mobile devices.

Knowledgebase tools: This product allows any employee, particularly call-center agents, get self-help on the web in a matter of seconds. It replaces conventional knowledgebase systems which are usually intranets in the form of plain HTML pages. Agents now retreive the information up to 66% faster!

Contextual e-mail autoresponders: Although in early production stage, this product is very promissing for companies dealing with large amount of inbound e-mail traffic.

Who we help

In alphabetical order: Avea (Second largest GSM operator of Turkey), Hepsiburada (Largest e-commerce website of Turkey, owned by one of the largest conglomerates of Turkey, The Dogan Group), TEB (a partner of BNP BARIPAS, sixth largest bank in the world, and the largest one in the Euro region), Tefal (Co-operated with Project House), TTNET (Largest operator of DSL and dial-up services in Turkey)

In the press:

Our technology and applications were covered in variety of national newspapers, magazines and TV channels, including the following:

Please refer to our website for more information

An exclusive offer to the readers of this blog.

2009-01-14T12:41:00.000-08:00

I realised we have a couple of very loyal returning visitors out there who almost come back each day to check for new updates! Given that this blog has an average 20 visitors a day, i thought it wouldn't be an awful idea to offer you guys an opportunity to exclusively test our new product before the official launch date. So whether you already have a shopping experience with Hepsiburada or not, please go ahead and ask a question or two. (Please note that the bot is not responsible for recognizing product names or brands.) Your feedback would be greatly appreciated. And stay tuned for more exclusive news!

Yet another TV appearance

2008-12-25T14:57:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of Melih Bayram Dede, the following interview was aired on TVNET, a national TV channel.

Technologic by Melih Bayram Dede from ekim kaya on Vimeo.

The Inet-tr Conference

2008-12-17T23:55:00.000-08:00

We'll be presenting a paper at the Inet-tr Conference on "Virtual Assistants" in Ankara. (ODTÜ, 22nd of December, 4:30-6:30 PM)

Here's the schedule

Update: Here's the video shot during the presentation:

Inet-tr Konferansı 2008 from ekim kaya on Vimeo.

Our virtual office in the US

2008-12-15T03:34:00.000-08:00

Now we have a "virtual" presence in the form of a PO Box and a local phone number in the United States. We're hoping to announce the opening of a "real" New York office in the near future. :)

Time to spread the word. (And the product!)

2008-12-07T11:37:00.000-08:00

We want virtual assistants to be used widely out on the web. So it's kind of a mission for us to make them available for any entity, corporate, or personal. As a part of this effort, we pre-launched the "build your own virtual assistant" tool. We set the official launch date as January 1st, and we'll be collecting valuable feedback from the beta tester community until then. Our PR monster Merve will be promoting the tool during her job, introducing it to some 1500 unique daily visitors of our website.

Although this product offers limited features compared to the Botégo-managed version, it still delivers the core elements of a virtual assistant that you can use on a personal website, blog, or even the corporate web site of an SME. In addition to the usual question&answer feature, it also functions as a guide, automatically navigating the user to the relevant page on the website (depending on the topic the question is related to) making it a really powerful tool. And it's totally free!

I had mentioned on a previous post that we collect transcripts to analyze the data they contain, in order to increase our expertise in language processing. Upon the launch of this product, that content will be of a broader and more diverse nature, since new transcripts from different sources will be pouring in, in compliance with the user agreement. So this is basicly a win-win situation. We're eager to see some working samples around the web! If you're interested in becoming a beta tester, jump into our "close beta test room" on Friendfeed.

Hello world!

2008-11-22T15:53:00.000-08:00

We're also targeting international markets now. Not that the Turkish market has saturated or anything, it's a move we've been planning since the very first day. Our priority has always been creating a decent client base though. Now that we've reached that goal, our next step is to further extend the vision. We've already built a limited demo for a client candidate based in the US. It's a concrete example demonstrating language-independency of our product.

"How to start a business while you study"

2008-11-17T04:49:00.000-08:00

Last week was a week of events. Here's the video shot by Televidyon team during the conference moderated by Etohum founder, Burak Büyükdemir.

Another microsite and another seminar

2008-11-13T08:18:00.000-08:00

As an I.T.U. alumni, i was proud to have the opportunity to attend an MIS class, addressing students on entrepreneurship. Courtesy of Professor Halefsan Sümen, i'll do it again, tomorrow.

We've been bringing up the issues with the web, with a series of microsites. Here's the final one: http://www.insansorar.com (in Turkish)