Xatkit

One of the complaints we were getting is that there was no easy way to try our chatbots.

We even created an installation video to show how installing Xatkit on your website can be done in less than 5min but I guess there is always people that want first to play with the product before even committing to a free installation.

So now Xatkit has a live demo site!: https://wooxatkitdemo.wpengine.com/

We're happy to say that we won the SpinUOC 2021 competition. Among 100 initial participants , a first filter brought down the number to 20, a second one to 8 and after a final life event where each of the 8 candidates presented their talks we won the competition!

As a result we got some (little) money, some publicity (e.g. https://twitter.com/4YFN_MWC/status/1405780375104901121 ) and, especially, a boost of confidence and validation of the quality of our work and MVP.

Moving on to the real validation, the one that only paying clients bring!

Xatkit gets selected as an innovative company and receives funding from the Catalan Government to speed up our technological development.

This funding secures and will help us grow the innovation activity we conduct around the world of chatbots to make sure we keep offering you the most agile and flexible chatbot solution. Always with the goal to create the best bot for your specific needs. If you’ve been following us, you know we have already released quite a few improvements and extensions to Xatkit (connector with nlp.js, testing bots, monitoring them with InfluxDB, a new bot language to facilitate the creation of complex bots,…).

Expect even more in the upcoming months!!!

We have changed (again) the language we propose to easily define all kinds of bots. It's now implemented as a Java-based Fluent API.

You may think we are crazy (or just plain stupid), iterating again on the core components of our platform instead of being out there selling. We spent a lot of time wondering the same ourselves.

But at the same time, now it's the time to make sure the language (and tooling infrastructure around it) is exactly what we need moving forward as we can still "break things". And after building a few bots for some potential clients, we realized that we were not yet there.

So far, we're very happy with the change and feel that the investment is already paying off. But it's indeed scary to make this kind of decision. You're always afraid of not being objective and just waste your scarce startup resources!

Xatkit is a very flexible bot development framework that can be easily accommodated to generate native chatbots for a variety of platforms.

Our brand new native WordPress Chatbot Plugin is a perfect example.

It relies on DialogFlow to understand your visitors and on the WordPress REST API to answer them.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

And if you have five minutes, please fill out this survey explaining what you expect out of a WP Chatbot

After building some initial bots with Xatkit, we realized we needed to revamp our bot definition language to make it poweful enough to cover the wide variety of chatbots people are looking to define, from more open bots (where the user can ask anything at anytime) to close bots (where the conversation path is much more restricted).

As a result we have moved the core of a language to a state machine (-like) semantics.

It took us more than one month working almost full time on this to define the new language and adapt the parser, editor, engine,... but we believe it's been worth it. Check out the details of the new language.

We released the first marketing video for Xatkit where we try to explain why you need chatbots and why Xatkit can help you to create, host and monitor your chatbot.

I'd love it if you take a look at the video ( here) and let us know your thoughts about it.

I'm afraid it's now too late to change the video itself but we could use the feedback to clarify the message around the video and to prepare future ones!.

You cannot call yourself a "chatbot company" if you don't have an active chatbot on your home page :-)

Surprisingly enough, this is not that that uncommon. But I always thought this was giving a very poor image of the bot tech from the company. This should be one of the most obvious examples of "eating your own dog food": if you sell chatbots, use one on your website as an example.

So, this is what we have now done. I'd like to introduce you to Xat, our chatbot that will help you understand the services we offer (and, more importantly, we'll help us to see what you want to know so that we can add those questions to future versions of Xat).

Have you already tried it? If not, go ahead and chat with Xat here: https://xatkit.com/

We recently added a dark mode to our chatbots.

Was this a feature requested by our users? No

Was this a feature we saw all our competitors offering? No

So why did we do it? Honestly, because it was fun and cool to do.

YES, you're thinking this is the worse possible reason to implement a new feature. And you're probably right. But sometimes it's fine to deviate a little bit from the mots productive path, have some fun, recharge your batteries and get back to work.

Plus, some people even like it!

We just launched the first Xatkit WordPress plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/xatkit-chatbot-connector/

This is a modest achievement as this version of the plugin just aims to help you integrate existing bots in your WordPress site. Still, it feels really good to start bringing the power of chatbots to the huge WordPress community!