15 sessions, 1000+ viewers — the botscamp Premiere on Dec 7 🚀 rocked. Wrap up of the worldwide first 🌏🌍🌎 online conference about 🤖 bots. 🇨🇭 Swiss Made

December 7th. The first botscamp turned the lights on — brightness on the evolutionary stage of the automatization caused by algorithms. Bots taking over management processes and chatbots delivering answers in dialogues. The two Swiss bot pioneers Thomas Schulz and Maurice Codourey make up a positive balance.

The 4+ hours livestream programme attracted more than 150 participants from 16 countries for the 15 international sessions at 15 minutes each. That summed up to over 1000 cumulated views. The participants voted before the online conference for the sessions they wanted to see and experience. Peter Buchroithner’s session about the impressive success of his Swelly chatbot on the platforms of Facebook Messenger, Kik and Telegram received the most votes. Swelly’s decision helper service between two options for food, clothes, shoes or other products collected already more than one million users. A true bot success story. The founder recently relocated with his company from Vienna to San Francisco.

Knowledge gain instead of panic

The hype about bots and chatbots is colossal. Within Facebook Messenger there are now around 35’000 active bots and that figure is increasing. The services provided by all these bots providing a quality range from poor handicraft to professional and well-conceived applications. The latter changed already some marketing mixes and the exponential growth is arranging fascination and concern at the same time.

After a pilot project in healthcare by Shaila Bot — a model for building up a specific community to exchange knowledge via Twitter and Slack for hospitals, health associations as well as pharma, medtech, biotech or health IT Thomas Schulz and Maurice Codourey wanted not only to share their experiences but the ones from other bot aficionados as well. Within two days in September 2016 the botscamp was born. Applying their preferred working method rapid prototyping they construct the website, Twitter channel, the open Slack community and accounts within Facebook, Linkedin and XING.

Task: To provide an overview and knowledge exchange as an online conference within the bot events popping up at the speed of light all over the planet. Without travel time and costs and with a comfortable replay function. They scouting for speakers, executed by a bot, focused start-up developers, true bot makers as well as research, sciences and other bot people. More than 20 speakers registered worldwide and from Switzerland as well — Valora Lab, Daniel Niklaus Netlive IT, Zeix AG and healthinar.

No overhasty decisions, the sessions at a glance

The moderated opening and closing sessions confirmed by the greeting notes of the innovation partners Swisscom Health and digitalswitzerland the national and international significance of the bot development. At the same time there was a basic attitude about the reasonableness of concepts and the measureability of this young industry.

The sessions of the first botscamp

• How Multi-Platform-Thinking helped us to reach 1 Million users, Peter Buchroithner from Swelly Chatbot
• Building chat bots with deep learning, Alan from LASTMILE
• GuestBot: Treat hotel guests as VIPs, Dimitris Tsirikos
• Human-Centered by Design — What we can learn from Chatbots, Sibylle Peuker from Zeix AG
• ottspott: Your phone support bot. Inside Slack.
• Shaila Bot, the smart healthcare community bot, Maurice Codourey smarthealthlab
• Improving your bots overtime, http://smartly.ai Hicham Tahiri
• Learnings from building the first Swiss retail chatbot, Cyril Dorsaz Valora Lab
• Automated analytics for more engaged bots, İlker Köksal Botanalytics
• Good Bot, Bad Bot: How Chatbots Fit in our Digital Universe, Adam Fingerman, ArcTouch
• Is the time for bots finally here? Daniel Niklaus Netlive IT
• Lessons learned creating a virtual personality, Mica — the Hipster Cat Bot Barbara Ondrisek
• Do bots need a gender? And why does this matter? Sunjoy Mathieu & Aisha Schnellmann healthinar
• Design considerations for machine learning system, Akemi Tazaki
• Sparky Bot — a conference bot Thomas Schulz

Here you find all the trailers from the 15 sessions. If you register until Dec 21 for our botscamp Reloaded! you will get all the replays for free!

The botscamp developed at an insane speed, challenged the founders with technical and moderation issues. Thanks to Sparky Bot a lot of organizational tasks were done automatically in a 24/7 mode. The success surprised Thomas Schulz and Maurice Codourey — within 12 weeks they reached 2500 followers on the Twitter channel.

botscamp reloaded — 2nd edition will start March 23rd, 2017

The speakers and participants reported pleasure about the saved time and costs and the many learnings from the botscamp premiere. And the botscamp already took the step from a webinar to a true online conference.

Join now our free slack community to get beside great people interactions, news and updates a 10% discount for our next conference March 23, 2017.

We will pimp up the second edition according to the experiences made. As an online conference botscamp offers a faster rhythm than traditional yearly events — up to three or four editions a year. With the next early bird tickets already in place, we strengthen the claim «the botspot to be» continuously. With bottish regards, till soon.