By acquiring the start-up company Botmock, Wal-Mart has increased its investment in voice and chat shopping technology. The former was established in 2016 and has developed a set of tools for designing, prototyping, testing, and deploying cross-platform conversational applications.Botmock said that at the beginning of its establishment, most of its early customers worked directly on platforms such as DialogFlow or IBM Watson, which made it more difficult for them to quickly test their ideas.
At the same time, non-developers are using tools such as Visio or LucidCharts to create their conversation flow. Botmock promises to provide a better tool set that enables the team to avoid blind spots in design and build a better overall conversation experience.
Botmock’s solution provides a drag-and-drop editor to design chatbots (or voice bots) dialogue. When users design their dialog flow, the system automatically develops code in the background. It also helps to deal with the specific and complex issues involved in the project-such as the specific limitations of the platform-while promoting teamwork.
Prior to the Walmart acquisition, the BoTMock system worked with the company’s existing tools, such as Atlassian JIRA, RASA, DialogFlow, Atlassian Confluence, Slack, Zapier, Alexa Skills Kit or IBM Watson. Then, the dialog developed in Botmock can be output to a text or voice-based platform, includingAppleBusiness chat, WhatsApp, SMS, Messenger,MicrosoftOfficeTeams, Slack, Alexa or Google Assistant.
According to the latest version of the BoTMock website, its tools are used by more than 50,000 people. It also touts customers in various verticals, including large companies such as Nationwide, Accenture, Delta, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Oracle, Viasat, Mercury.ai, Liveperson, BlueRobot, BT, Avanade and Enbridge.