What The Guardian has learned from chatbots - Digiday

For the past two months, the Guardian has been testing a Facebook Messenger bot, "Sous-chef," that provides recipe suggestions to people based on what they had in their fridges. Now, it's using the learnings to shape its main news bot, which launched a week ago. It's too early to get data on how many people are actively using the news app, though the Guardian's 6.2 million Facebook followers all have access to the bot. We spoke to Martin Belam, The Guardian's social and new formats editor; and Chris Wilk, group product manager for off-platform, about what they've learned. Keep it simple The bot has a simple setup: Users enter specific ingredients like "salmon" or types of cuisine, dietary requirements, and specific dishes, to get started.