I was recently looking at a slide in the pitch deck of an AR startup and there was a graph mapping the addressable markets of individual smartphone AR platforms by devices. When rounding to the hundredth of a percent, Google’s addressable market with Tango makes up 0.00% of the smartphone market.
That’s a bit of a problem when Apple is about to bring smartphone AR to hundreds of… Read More
Last year, Seeed Studio launched ReSpeaker WiFi Audio / IoT board based on Mediatek MT7688, as well as an optional microphone array board with 7 microphones and 12 LEDs. Later on, they introduced a...
I don’t know about you guys, but I think this might very well be one of the most amazing colander of all time!
Don’t let his pretty eyes fool you, this spaghetti monster is a straining master. And if you’re planning a spaghetti dish, this noodly master will grant your wish! Whether you want to build an altar to Pastafarianism at the center of the kitchen, require a more interesting colander to wear as a hat, or just want to enjoy some spaghetti-and-meatballs for dinner, this thing should serve as a viable tool for each of those tasks, all while looking so attractive!
Resolution is one of the most important factors to take into account when considering different 3D printers and extends beyond the minimum layer height value that many people are familiar with. In fact, minimum layer height tends to be a poor representation of a 3D printer’s quality.
In this guide, you’ll learn about each of the different components associated with a 3D printer’s resolution. We’ll go over Z resolution, minimum feature size, X/Y resolution, and layer ovality, to get a complete picture of resolution in 3D printing.
Z Resolution
The best known value associated with a 3D printer’s resolution is the minimum Z layer height. 3D printers construct objects layer-by-layer, and this value describes the thickness of one of these layers. For most FDM machines, the smallest practical layer height is 0.1mm or 100 microns and for SLA machines, 0.025mm or 25 microns.
Many FDM manufacturers will list minimum Z layer heights as low as 10 microns. While this is technically possible, printing layers as thin as 10 microns on FDM machines is impractical. Most stepper motors are capable of moving that platform by as little as 10 microns, but FDM extruders cannot control the flow of filament precisely enough to produce clean results. For this reason, 10 micron prints on FDM machines often end up looking worse than 100 micron prints even though the individual layers may be finer.
When to use thinner layers
In many cases, using thinner layers has few to no advantages and only serves to increase print time. Thinner layers are most useful for improving the surface finish on parts that have diagonal or curved surfaces. Formlabs has a great illustration of this concept below.
For FDM machines, minimum feature size is a function of the diameter of the print nozzle. The most common nozzle diameter is 0.4mm and ergo, the smallest feature that can be printed is 0.4mm. Many printers allow their nozzles to be swapped out and 3rd party upgrades can be purchased with diameters as narrow as 0.15mm. This concept applies to features that stand on their own such as towers and spikes and isn’t applicable to components like text embossed onto the side of an object. We’ll go into greater depth on embossed features in the ‘X/Y Resolution’ section.
It’s important to keep in mind that smaller features are more easily deformed by heat in FDM printing. Tall and thin towers often fail because the heat of the molten plastic and nozzle cause the structures to soften.
Formlabs Form 2 printed and hand painted figure from Modern Life: Image Source
In SLA printers, minimum feature resolution is a function of the spot size of the laser. Because SLA printing doesn’t involve the same thermal stresses as FDM, tall thin towers are more viable and small features are easily resolved.
X/Y Resolution
X/Y resolution breaks your printer down to its bare hardware and is determined by the minimum rotation of your stepper motor and mechanics of the machine. Lithophanes are useful objects for explaining X/Y resolution.
A lithophane is an image that has been extruded in three dimensions such that the dark components of the image are thicker than light components. When a light is shone through, thicker portions of the model will appear darker and the original image appears. Learn the 3 Steps for Creating Your Own Lithophanes here!
Lithophanes are printed vertically rather than flat on the platform because the resolution in the X and Y axis is often better than the resolution in the Z axis. Below is an example of the cross section of a lithophane. X/Y resolution describes the minimum possible deviation of your nozzle or laser spot and often falls on the scale of 16 microns though this can vary by machine.
Cross section of a lithophane in Formlabs’ PreForm Software
In FDM printers, there are other factors to take into account when considering X and Y resolution. FDM printers that use a direct drive extrusion setup carry weight above the nozzle that can translate to excessive inertia at high speeds. This leads to an effect called banding where vertical deviations become visible in a model and X/Y resolution is decreased. CoreXY setups reduce this effect through clever kinematics that make the X and Y axis independent of any one motor.
Layer Ovality
Layer ovality is one of the more subtle parameters to take into account when considering 3D printer resolution. When layers are deposited in FDM printing, the outer bounds take on an oval shape which contributes to a rougher surface finish and poor transparency.
Layers created by SLA printers have inherently less ovality than those created via FDM. Laser-based stereolithography creates layers that are more rectangular and this allows for a smoother surface finish and superior transparency.
Sanding parts is a great way to decrease the ovality of the exterior layers and improve surface finish. Coatings like XTC-3D work by filling the gaps between layers to produce a smooth and transparent part. Taulman3D created an excellent illustration of this effect that you can learn more about on their T-glase optics page.
Each of the 4 components of resolution in 3D printing will impact your final print quality. To gain a greater understanding of resolution in 3D printing especially in regards to SLA, check out Formlabs’ post What Does Resolution Mean in 3D Printing?
Matterport is picking up new funding as it looks to speed the development of deep learning tech in its capture technology which brings immersive views of spaces into 360-degree 3D The company, which largely specializes in scanning spaces for commercial and real estate purposes, announced today that they’ve picked up $5 million in funding from Ericsson Ventures. This strategic raise… Read More
Cambridge postgraduate student [Adam Greig] helped design a rocket avionics system consisting of a series of disc-shaped PCBs arranged in a stack. There’s a lot that went into the system and you can get a good look at it all through the flickr album.
Built with the help of Cambridge University Spaceflight, the Martlet is a 3-staging sounding rocket that lifts to 15km/50K feet on Cesaroni Pro98 engines. [Adam]’s control system uses several Arm Cortex M4s on various boards rather than having just one brain controlling everything.
Each disc is a module that plays a specific role in the system. There are a couple of power supply boards sporting twin LTC2975 able to supply custom power to a dozen different circuits. The power system has a master control board also sporting an M4. There’s an IMU board with the guidance system — accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, and barometer, all monitored by an algorithm that computes the rocket’s position and attitude in-flight. There’s a radio board with a GPS receiver and an ISM band radio transceiver for telemetry, as well as a datalogger with 10 thermocouple measurement channels. Engines are controlled by the pyro board which controls firing currents on four different channels. The vertical spacers also serve to transmit power and data to neighboring boards.
If you’re interested in learning more, check out the project’s code and schematics on [Adam]’s GitHub repository.
HTC has cut the price of its Vive virtual reality headset by $200, bringing the system’s cost down to $599. The discount is meant to stimulate consumer interest in the system, and make it easier to afford accessories, including the Vive Tracker that went on sale earlier this year. It also comes with a one-month free trial of HTC’s Viveport subscription service, which offers access to a selection of VR games. “We want to really significantly boost VR adoption now across the globe,” says Vive US general manager Dan O’Brien, as the Vive’s second holiday season approaches. “We think now is the right time to reset the price.”
This price drop mirrors the Oculus Rift’s $200 price cut in March, and it means that both systems now have the same...
Microsoft announced today that its conversational speech recognition system has reached a 5.1% error rate, its lowest so far. This surpasses the 5.9% error rate reached last year by a group of researchers from Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research and puts its accuracy on par with professional human transcribers who have advantages like the ability to listen to text several times. Read More
Space suits are cool — and complicated. Earlier this week, my colleague Loren Grush launched her new series Space Craft by seeing what wearing one is like. The answer? Exhausting. Unsurprisingly, science fiction writers, movie directors, and prop-makers also love space suits — you’ll find them everywhere from Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Have Space Suit—Will Travel, to the latest Alien movie. But not everybody does their homework: for every fictional space suit that’s more than just a fancy costume, there’s one that’s impractical and nonsensical even in a fictional world.
There’s no such thing as an “ideal” space suit, because you need specific features for different environments. But we can answer a few basic questions. Is a fictional...
Chat Bots have taken over the world in a bat of an eye. We all have witnessed them. But do we know how much effort and time it takes to build one? It seems pretty easy on the surface. Technically, you could actually build a Chat Bot in a weekend with all the tools that are available.
But here is why you shouldn’t.
Similar to any other software development process, a Chat Bot also has a life cycle. The process of building a Chat Bot has to go under the following stages.
The Chat Bot Life Cycle
Each stage in the life cycle has to go under certain processes, some of the important steps are explained below. These will prove you why building a successful bot within a weekend is improbable.
1. Creating a chat bot’s persona (botsonality) is not easy — cannot be done overnight!!!
Building botsonality itself includes many steps (go through our previous post to know what). It needs a lot of research about both marketing and language selection. So, of course, this step, which is the first out of many, is going to cost you more than a weekend!
2. Building an Interesting conversation flow consumes time.
After building up the persona of the bot, which aligns ideally with your business field, maintaining an interesting conversation flow takes a lot of effort. It should not bore the user, not mislead the user, should be relevant, on — point and easy to understand. Aforementioned takes a little more time because many different scenarios related to the chosen domain should be controlled. So, of course, this step takes a lot of time and more concentration plus creativity. Conversational bots make the cooperation between your chat bot and your group of onlookers more open, enabling you to comprehend your client’s needs better and gather more valuable information.
3. Building and Configuring your Bot
When it comes to building the bot, you have the option of either using the existing Bot platforms or coding from the scratch. If you choose to use Bot Platforms, this step is made rather easy.
But, Let’s see what happens if your choice is building your bot by coding from scratch.
Having defined the conversational flow of your bot, you need to put it together by building it up. This is where the code comes in to play. There are so many options out there to create a bot nowadays; you need to again research a bit on them, to find the best platform to build your bot, considering your experience, knowledge and resources. This may include learning about APIs, learn to code too for some people! So this step too takes a considerable period.
Configuring is really connecting your bot with relevant platforms.
This step comes after you build your bot. A bot itself alone won’t help your business. You should get it connected to messaging apps. This step does not require time as much as the other steps do. But choosing the best messaging platforms which suit the target market is a bit tricky.
4. Test and get Beta users on board
Testing is the most important phase in the process of building a bot, I would say. Though we build a bot planning so many scenarios while testing, we cannot know how much deviation from plans could happen. So testing is a phase where a lot of effort should be put in to. And testing the application with different beta users can help standardizing and refining the conversations to be more realistic and relevant.
5. Monitoring and Maintenance
Once your chat bot is built to par with your requirements, it should be deployed and tested. Then comes the phase where you should monitor how the actual users are engaging with that.
After observing the engagement of the potential customers, the chat bot should be continuously refined to serve the customers better. This means once you build a chat bot, you just cannot forget it if you are expecting it to bring in more sales/customers or give your customers a better experience.
So the above five reasons are good enough to prove that building a Chat Bot is not something easy as it seems. It requires a considerable time to build a good Chat Bot which can be beneficial for your domain. Even if you manage to bypass some of these phases, it won’t be a successful Chat Bot. So do follow all the steps and build yourself the best Chat Bot. Happy Chat Bot building!
We at pulsechat have spent a lot of time researching, analyzing, developing and testing pulsebot. Do visit us and try now for your dealership needs.
One of the most popular uses for the Raspberry Pi in a commercial setting is video walls, digital signage, and media players. Chances are, you’ve probably seen a display or other glowing rectangle displaying an advertisement or tweets, powered by a Raspberry Pi. [Florian] has been working on a project called info-beamer for just this use case, and now he has something spectacular. He can display a video on multiple monitors using multiple Pis, and the configuration is as simple as taking a picture with your phone.
[Florian] created the info-beamer package for the Pi for video playback (including multiple videos at the same time), displaying public transit information, a twitter wall, or a conference information system. A while back, [Florian] was showing off his work on reddit when he got a suggestion for auto-configuration of multiple screens. A few days later, everything worked.
Right now, the process of configuring screens involves displaying fiducials on each display, taking a picture from with your phone and the web interface, and letting the server do a little number crunching. Less than a minute after [Florian] took a picture of all the screens, a movie was playing across three weirdly oriented displays.
Below, you can check out the video of [Florian] configuring three Pis and displays to show a single video, followed by a German language presentation going over the highlights of info-beamer.
Richard Batey of Immortal Art Studio created a hilarious chest tattoo for trucker Kenny Ollerenshaw that makes it look like he’s a tiny man driving his own body...(Read...)
In a modern world, everything is developing with an extreme speed, and even legal industry is moving forward as times are changing.
Innovations In Justice Industry
New approaches and technologies are quickly starting to fill the justice industry. A new trend that is becoming highly popular nowadays is an in-house legal department. Recently, companies have started to hire lawyers that would work especially for them.
This change is helping lots of law school graduates to find a job, or an internship as big companies with large legal departments would hire junior lawyers to help them gain experience as in-house lawyers.
In 2017 more and more new trends are starting to emerge in a legal industry.
These new trends help lawyers and law firms to make their practice more efficient and productive. Innovations that are coming to justice business are mainly focused on making the process of a legal consultation:
much easier
less time consuming
money saving
Recent changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure permit to use electronically stored information such as e-mails, instant messages, voicemails, e-calendars, graphics and data on handheld devices in litigation.
These innovations show that legal industry is accepting and welcoming new changes that are starting to fill a modern world in almost every other area.
As it is known, technologies are usually the reason for changes in a nowadays world. Ignoring new trends that are popping out everywhere at this point, would be impossible and useless at the same time. Often, people get scared to try something new and different, but innovations are a great way of making your work more efficient and profitable.
Introducing changes to justice area can make a life of both a lawyer and a client much easier.
Implementation of new ways of doing work can help to:
reduce time
reduce money wastage
increase profit
optimize the whole working process.
Also, one of such innovations in the legal industry are chatbots.
Chatbots In A Legal Industry
Other modifications in law industry that recently became extremely popular are chatbots. Chatbots are appearing in almost every work field, and legal industry is not an exception.
Legal bots are a great way of optimizing a work process to save lawyers time and money.
Chatbot doesn’t require a rest or vacation it works 24/7 in order to provide customers with a legal help whenever they need it. As well, it is much beneficial and agile than a human lawyer consultation.
A lot of lawyers are afraid that chatbots can take their place and replace them.
However, this technology can be a great enhancement to a lawyer to make them better, smarter and more efficient. Lawyers shouldn’t be afraid to start using chatbots at their practice as it is a great tool that can work for their benefit.
Recently, Montreal-based law firm EXEO launched a smart virtual assistant to help future immigrants. IVA (Immigration Virtual Assistant) helps people make the process of immigration much easier and less stressful. As we all know the immigration application process can be very complicated and complex which scares a lot of people.
IVA helps its users:
to reduce money, because they are not talking to a very expensive lawyer. They are communicating to the free chatbot.
to spend less time. Now they do not have to spend precious time trying to figure out the immigration process by themselves.
IVA is accessible via Facebook Messenger and provides its users with information concerning the opportunities that they have in a Q&A format. IVA includes a lot of different immigration program categories, including work permit applications, student visas, and permanent residence programs.
Another great example of how technologies can be useful in a legal area is Ailira chatbot. This bot is useful for both lawyers and its clients as it is really simple and fast in exploitation.
Ailira answers natural language questions with usable and helpful legal information in simple English. Another of its benefits is that it is much cheaper and faster than a human-lawyer consultation. You can contact Ailira 24/7 via Facebook Messenger and chat with it as you would with a friend, using instant messaging.
Ailira generates legal documents, provides you with helpful legal information and can even appoint you a meeting with a human lawyer to give you additional consultation if needed.
Ailira is useful for lawyers because it can reduce the amount of time spent on researching as this bot does it in seconds. You don’t have to be a professional lawyer or an expert in law to use Ailira as its main benefits are simplicity and accessibility which means that anyone can easily find relevant information.
AILIRA BOT(sending documents)
Ailira thinks fast and accurate.
She can find an exact answer to your question in seconds!
Ailira has been put up to a test to show you how precise she can be and how easily she can find a correct and relevant legal information. You can see yourselfhow quick she thinks and searches through millions of cases to find the most valuable information.
The modern world is filled with innovations that appear almost every day. Every work field is experiencing extreme technological progress, and a legal area is not an exception. Introducing and accepting new trends that are popping out now is the best way to make your work more efficient and productive.
By implementing new ways of doing business, you can:
-positively influence your work process. -cut your time and fund dissipation.
People should not be afraid to try out new trends because changes are the things that inspire people to move forward and develop in what they are doing.
By accepting progress in our everyday life, we can make for ourselves more time to spend on things that we really want to do.
Our Botscrew team had a great experience while working on Ailira and IVA Chatbots. We are happy that we had such a great opportunity to bring this bots to Facebook Messenger. And we want more! One of the most important things for our Botscrew team is challenging ourselves to try something new almost every day. That is why we are always searching for interesting projects that are going to test our abilities in order to create something innovative and creative. Our team has many progressive ideas how to create an original product, and we are happy to help you to bring your idea to life.
"Shot in November, 2012 near Cairns, Australia a total of 1,990 images in ultra high definition were taken over the course of a few hours from two camera equipped telescopes. These images were then combined into one video. Totality itself was recorded in 507 images during 2 minutes (the duration of totality for this eclipse)."..(Read...)
Over the last few years, our smartphones have become the cameras we use most — even for photographers. But that hasn’t stopped companies big and small from trying to upset the order of things. Ubiquiti Labs — a new part of Ubiquiti Networks, which has (until now) mostly made mesh Wi-Fi products — is the latest to try to take the simplicity and, well, ubiquity of “mobile photography” to the next level with a new $399 wearable camera called FrontRow.
FrontRow is actually two cameras — one on the “back” that uses a 8-megapixel sensor, and one on the “front” that’s just 5 megapixels — plus a 2-inch circular LCD touchscreen. This is all packed into a pendant the size of a half-dollar coin. (Or smaller than a fidget spinner, if you don’t get...
There are a million and one services for voice transcription on the market. But even with just one job to do, I’ve never seen a service that can handle the long tail of vocabulary used in the real world. This is particularly challenging if you’re a startup trying to sell your service to enterprises that rely on accurate transcription for their operations. Read More
Véritable spécialiste du maquillage, cette artiste crée des illusions d’optique terrifiantes de réalisme. Des têtes découpées ou transformées en scènes d’horreur… Bienvenue dans le monde imaginaire de Mimi Choi !
Pour certaines personnes le maquillage, c’est quelques petites retouches pour améliorer son apparence. Pour d’autres, à l’instar de l’artiste canadienne Mimi Choi, c’est une toute autre philosophie. Douée d’un véritable talent pour les illusions d’optique, cette dernière s’est spécialisée dans la création de make-ups effrayants et ultra-réalistes.
Des réalisations qui étonnent et qui ont offert à Mimi Choi une belle notoriété : son compte Instagram est désormais suivi par plus de 320 000 abonnés et chacune de ses photos sont likées des dizaines de milliers de fois. Une belle revanche pour cette ancienne professeure des écoles qui sentait sa créativité partir en fumée avant de décider de se lancer à corps perdu dans sa véritable passion : le maquillage artistique.
This direction has a huge effect of many branches of technology, esp. web or apps design, but mostly on the communication between brands and customers. That’s also one of the main reasons for chatbots’ increasing popularity. Most brands are doing their best to create them in a way that seems more persona than product.
While creating a chatbot, many of us are mostly focused on the topic of a conversation. We think about which questions should be asked, when, and what answers make sense. Many companies forget to tailor the scenario to the specific situation with the specific customer. While customers are different, they have something in common - each of them demands a fully natural form of interaction with a brand. We are more willing to visit places where the service has a personable attitude and doesn’t use formal expressions.
Currently, the main issue with chatbots is that customers tend to treat them as a robot and don’t feel comfortable during these conservations. As a result, sometimes customer service running bots is not necessarily faster or more attractive than other methods. Most people think that chatting with bots is only based on giving them commands.
Creating a chatbot with a specific character is easier said than done. However, it’s crucial for modern brands. On the other hand, only chatbots with a clearly-defined personality are able to prove their intelligence and convince customers to talk with them in an honest way.
Let’s look at an example of a bot with a specific character. Once, we did an experiment with my colleague and asked Siri if she is Cortana…
Siri seemed to become jealous. Now we know that she doesn’t like when users mistake her name with another AI assistant. What is more, Siri’s reaction is in line with the Apple brand, which is known from its individuality.
Therefore, we can definitely say that Siri has a character.
The best practices to create a chatbot with a character
Before you start to design your chatbots, you should go back the basics and thoroughly analyze all conversations with customers which have happened to date. Use all the sources you have, such as your live chat solution’s archives, contact center recordings and correspondences, if needed. The bot conversation’s scenario should be based on your knowledge about the customers. If not, your bot won’t be helpful for them.
You should be fully aware of your customers’ languages, their questions and issues. On the other hand, you ought to analyze your customer service employees’ answers as well — which of them elicit positive or negative emotions from your clients. In first step, you don’t have to prepare the scenarios for all cases. Focus on these matters which are repeatable and your employees must answer them over and over again.
Choose the conversations in which your customers were the most satisfied. Preparing the branches in a conversation tree should be based mainly on these experiences.
There are a lot of ways to ask chatbots to make a reservation for a film in the cinema. But this number is limitless and certain keywords keep repeating. If the movie is mostly for millennials, try to add some common sayings for this target audience to the scenario. But note that a brand’s chatbot for millennials doesn’t have to always be a laid-back, immature twentysomething named Harry.
Don’t try to create a chatbot which completely mimics your brand image. It should be your brand ambassador but not a member of your management board. Analyzing past conversations with your customers, you should know exactly which features your customers like the most during the conversations with your customer service employees. Next, do your best to implement them in the chatbots’ scenarios. When you’ve designed a bot, check several dozen times how the conversation runs. You have to be completely sure that the scenario is correct before you make it public.
Observing advances in artificial intelligence, we may predict that in the nearest future chatbots will be one of the main things to manage in creating a company’s brand. They even have the potential to replace the traditional ‘user interface’, becoming something more crucial for human-brand interaction.
I’m the Head of Research & Development at LiveChat. We’ve recently rolled out BotEngine, a chatbot factory that will allow any business to benefit from artificial intelligence. BotEngine beta version is now open and free to use.
Current VR might not be as convincing as the Matrix, but this Google Tango app lets you peer into the real world as if you were Neo himself.
The Tango Martix Scanner from VR and AR developer Null Real uses the special cameras fitted to Tango-ready Android phones to turn the walls, floors and ceilings of the environment around you into the virtual data streams that Keanu Reeves sees towards the end of the legendary 1999 sci-fi flick. You can walk around the room and peer into the camera as if you were really in the Martix. Pretty cool, huh?
Null Real is working on some other interesting projects too, like position tracking for mobile-based VR with no external sensors.
Google and other tech companies have come up with glasses and contact lenses for the purposes of AR, but Omega Ophthalmics is taking a much more invasive approach by using surgically implanted lenses to create a space for augmented reality inside the eye. Read More
Sometimes a clean energy innovation is on par with the standard version, so choosing between the two can be tough. When it comes to Tesla’s newest solar product, however, the choice is clear.
The first Tesla solar roofs have been installed, and they are beautiful. Ask the most high-profile owner of the roof: Elon Musk. On the Q2 August 2 earnings call for Tesla, Musk said that both he and Tesla CTO Jeffrey B. Straubel already have working solar roofs installed. He also provided unretouched photos of the installed solar tiles to showcase their aesthetic appeal.
image credit: Teslaimage credit: TeslaIn May Musk told the world that the solar tiles were about to be on sale, and that delivery in the U.S. would begin in late 2017. Only 16 days after they began taking pre-orders in May, Tesla was out of stock. The tiles are currently back-ordered well into 2018. Musk had promised that the solar roof would ultimately be cheaper than a traditional version; a claim that appears to be borne out thus far. Add in the infinity warranty for the tiles, and it’s hard to make a coherent argument against them.
How the newest features on Facebook Messenger can help an automotive dealership
Over the past year or so, since Facebook announced Chat bots for the Messenger platform, we have seen a proliferation of bots both good and bad. Facebook has also been rapidly improving the platforms to make the chat bots more ubiquitous. Here, I intend to introduce few of the newer features introduced by Facebook and talk about how these can make a positive impact on an automotive dealership using a chat bot such as Pulse Chat.
1. The Bot Discover tab
The discover tab helps a user find bots, nearby places and businesses to message. This is the place where businesses live in messenger.
This tab allows you to explore bots by category, recent activity and featured experiences without searching. This helps bots and businesses to engage with the community, by providing a dedicated interface.
Messenger’s new Discovery tab
The bots in this tab are classified into categories like entertainment, finance, food and drink, health and fitness, news and productivity, making it convenient for customers to find the best bot which satisfies their requirement. Before this feature, we as users had to spend time on choosing the bot which suits us the most, trying out several ones. This gives the customer a further personalized content experience faster.
Most importantly this tab also has non — bot, business accounts, accommodating the businesses to promote themselves. Any Facebook Page that has messaging enabled and has earned Facebook’s responsiveness badge can apply to appear in the Discover tab.
2. Group Bots and Chat Extensions
Until the introduction of “Group bots” with Messenger Chat Extensions the bot experience that Facebook Messenger provided was one to one (1:1), with this newest feature it has become more advanced and exciting. Chat extensions allow multiple users within a single bot conversation. This gives bots a better understanding as to what the user is trying to ask, thus, reduces the risk of misunderstanding what user posts, which is a general drawback seen in messenger bots.
Chat extensions in groups — Group Bot
Messenger is now robust enough to analyze the conversation and give a suggestion accordingly. Here are some examples,
“Wanna catch a movie tonight?” Tickets buying bots.
“Let’s get away this weekend?” Travel suggestion bots.
Further, chat extensions can be added to your groups, which will facilitate many extra features like, sharing music via your favorite apps like Spotify without having the app opened. Additionally you can add the Score, OpenTable, Food Network, the National Basketball Association, The Wall Street Journal and Kayak to your group with just a click of a button.
Chat Extensions in Messenger
You also can share the bots with friends like you used to share content in Messenger.
Share Bots in Messenger
Also, Messenger allows you to send and receive updates from task trackers and manage documents collaboratively, allowing group planning. This feature allows many businesses to reach their customer base more effectively. The product manager for messenger, Kemal El Moujahid expressed this idea on these features.
“Messenger offers businesses new ways to engage with their community and potential customers. Whether it’s raising awareness for a brand, enabling transactions, acquiring new customers, or delivering superior customer service, Messenger can be a core part of business solutions.”
3. Messenger Advert — In-app ads
Messenger is now a destination for advertisements (these ads can be from a website, Facebook or Instagram). Once the ‘send message’ option is clicked, a Messenger thread will be open up , and you will be able to see a configured message or a copy of the ad you clicked.
Messenger advert — Messenger as a destination for ads
May be you can offer a discount to a customer with a personalized touch, once the advert is clicked by the customer, he will be directed to a messenger conversation with the discount coupon.
Additionally, Messenger now has its’ own section for advertisements. Aforementioned is a stimulating introduction for the businesses out there. However, it is not very pleasing for the regular users (Who wants to see more ads?) As a remedy for this; the Messenger users will have the option of removing the advertisements (Though, they will be replaced with a new one.)
Sponsored section of Messenger dedicated for adverts
4. Seamless In-app Payments
Messenger 2.1 makes payments less demanding to setup and more consistent for individuals to checkout. Presently, consumers can pay utilizing a single step process through Messenger web view. Payments on Messenger is still in beta and accessible in the US. This sure is a feature which is anticipated by many, and is capable of enhancing customer experience.
In-app Payments in Messenger
5. Call-To-Action (CTA) Buttons
Further improving the customer experience, five new Call to Action buttons are now available for business pages, (making it 6 CTA choices in total) namely, ‘Send Message’, ‘Shop Now’, ‘Get Support’, ‘Get Updates’, ‘Play Now’, and ‘Get Started’. This addition will allow the users to foreknowledge on what to expect once they start a conversation with the particular page.
New CTA Button Additions
Chat bots allow businesses to exploit wide spread and inexpensive customer reach through messenger. The customer focus can vary from very basic to advanced customers, yet lies within a reachable circle through this kind of updates from messenger, which allows conversations to be more systematic, intelligent and interesting. Messenger bots do offer specialized services, answering common customer service questions and streamline product purchases yielding a larger competitive advantage to your company.
Dealerships and the newest additions
Car Dealers spend thousands of dollars per month on Social Media advertising. A Car Dealer Chat bot completes your Facebook marketing sales funnel by providing a new stream of untapped leads from a platform already in everyone’s back pocket.
A bot which is designed for dealerships removes barriers by immediately providing contact information for each car shopper and a way for your brand to communicate with them. You can utilize the Discover tab to find the most suitable dealership bot for you. You will see a whole list of dealership related bots once the category is picked, you can make your choice after venturing the available bots.
Messenger in app payments also can be used to enhance the customer experience by allowing the customer to make a payment via messenger, in a use case like making an advance payment. The customer can view all the payment related details once the payment is done successfully, without even having to visit the store.
Further, the page of a dealership can be customized with the most suitable CTA button, giving the user a better understanding of what kind of a reply he is going to receive back, reducing the time that he will have to spend on pondering on the kind of answer he will get.
How cool will that be to have a Messenger bot for your dealership, which allows your customers to shop, pay, share with your dealer groups, get support/ updates about related to deals, discounts, and dealerships? We at Pulse are waiting to fuse these newest additions to Pulse Chat, providing your customer the best customer experience.
After a rise in acid attacks in London, with some against food delivery riders last month, Deliveroo is now providing its workers with helmet-mounted cameras. Since the attacks, over 70 Deliveroo riders have said they do not want to complete a delivery because of safety fears, reports the BBC. The initial trial of helmet cameras will be offered in the Hackney area of East London, a trouble spot, and will allow riders to film evidence in case of future attacks. A new security feature allowing riders to raise concerns about specific addresses — which is shared with the company and local authorities — has also been introduced in the Deliveroo app.
Additionally, Deliveroo promised to hire 50 new employees to focus on rider safety. "The...
Tesla’s Model 3 is unique in a lot of ways, but one that stood out among the early reviews and photos was the dashboard, which is essentially unbroken by instrumentation save for that single, large 15-inch touchscreen that sits in the middle next to the steering wheel. We have photos of the dash and its various screens, but a Tesla fan put together an interactive simulation of the… Read More
La libéralisation du format Thunderbolt 3 a probablement bousculé un peu les choses, alors que la plupart des boîtiers de cartes graphiques externes coûtent de véritables petites fortunes, l’arrivée d’un standard utilisable librement risque de pousser sur le marché des solutions beaucoup plus accessibles.
Les solutions graphiques externes de type boitier ou dock, permettent d’ajouter les capacités de calcul et d’affichage d’une carte graphique performante de PC de bureau à un portable ou un MiniPC classique au travers d’une connexion spécialisée. Avec l’ouverture du Thunderbolt 3, le nombre de machines qui vont employer ce type de connecteur va probablement rapidement augmenter, ce qui fait bien les affaires des fabricants de solutions graphiques comme AMD ou Nvidia qui vont pouvoir trouver de nouvelles cibles pour leurs puces graphiques.
Avec des solutions graphiques externes, on peut profiter du meilleur des deux mondes : Utiliser en mobilité un portable classique avec une bonne autonomie mais dénué de circuit graphique avancé et le connecter en mode sédentaire à un boitier externe qui lui apportera des fonctions 3D puissantes mais également toute la connectique nécessaires pour exploiter totalement son engin : Ports USB pour connecter des périphériques de saisie, port réseau Ethernet, sortie vidéo et même un retour d’alimentation pour recharger la batterie du portable.
Ce type de dispositif est donc parfait pour étendre les capacités de son portable en mode bureau et une seule prise lui suffit ce qui permet de vraiment profiter rapidement de toutes ses capacités.
Ce travail avec des sociétés externes se dirige pour le moment vers des usages professionnels, les cartes Titan Xp et Quadro sont visées par la marque. Mais cela aura évidemment des retombées plus générales. Quand des constructeurs de boîtiers s’empareront du sujet, quand il mettront bout à bout leur expérience dans la conception d’alimentations adaptées, de la connectique nécessaire et de boîtiers, le tarif de ces engins devrait largement baisser.
Un dock Thunderbolt 3 de Belkin
Il est difficile de concevoir que ce type d’appareil coûte encore aujourd’hui souvent plus de 450€ et qu’un dock Thunderbolt 3 coûte au bas mot 299€. La disparition des royalties liées à l’usage du format d’Intel devrait baisser la note et surtout attirer plus de concurrence. On devrait donc voir les prix s’affaisser rapidement.
The Robbe and Martelé trunk bar set instantly transforms your living room into a high class bar. This exquisite leather and wood trunk is stocked with everything from a 12 bottle wine rack to top quality bar accouterments like silver plated Martelé drinkware.
I was recently looking at a slide in the pitch deck of an AR startup and there was a graph mapping the addressable markets of individual smartphone AR platforms by devices. When rounding to the hundredth of a percent, Google’s addressable market with Tango makes up 0.00% of the smartphone market.
That’s a bit of a problem when Apple is about to bring smartphone AR to hundreds of… Read More
Image Source: Formlabs
Formlabs Form 2 printed and hand painted figure from Modern Life: Image Source
Cross section of a lithophane in Formlabs’ PreForm Software
Image Source: Formlabs
Image Source: Taulman3D
Matterport is picking up new funding as it looks to speed the development of deep learning tech in its capture technology which brings immersive views of spaces into 360-degree 3D The company, which largely specializes in scanning spaces for commercial and real estate purposes, announced today that they’ve picked up $5 million in funding from Ericsson Ventures. This strategic raise… Read More
Microsoft announced today that its conversational speech recognition system has reached a 5.1% error rate, its lowest so far. This surpasses the 5.9% error rate reached last year by a group of researchers from Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research and puts its accuracy on par with professional human transcribers who have advantages like the ability to listen to text several times. Read More
There are a million and one services for voice transcription on the market. But even with just one job to do, I’ve never seen a service that can handle the long tail of vocabulary used in the real world. This is particularly challenging if you’re a startup trying to sell your service to enterprises that rely on accurate transcription for their operations. Read More
Google and other tech companies have come up with glasses and contact lenses for the purposes of AR, but Omega Ophthalmics is taking a much more invasive approach by using surgically implanted lenses to create a space for augmented reality inside the eye. Read More
Tesla’s Model 3 is unique in a lot of ways, but one that stood out among the early reviews and photos was the dashboard, which is essentially unbroken by instrumentation save for that single, large 15-inch touchscreen that sits in the middle next to the steering wheel. We have photos of the dash and its various screens, but a Tesla fan put together an interactive simulation of the… Read More
