[AMA] Learn how we make our bots at TARS

Hi Guys,

This is @arnav here. For the last 1.5 years I have been managing content creation at TARS. i.e. all the bots, emails, articles and documentation you have seen emerge from our end were made or written by me (yes, I am the guy who chooses all of the gifs).

Some of my work:

Check out some of the bots I have created below. Most of them were to demo a feature or use case which we wanted to project

DiCaprio Bot Shows how bots can be used with google sheets to run a whole business

Tourism quiz bot A demo quiz bot we created. Shows how companies can use quizzes to engage their customers and run promo campaigns.

Xkcd bot a fun little bot I created to show you random xkcd comics. Uses API integration

Headlines bot Uses NewsAPI to show you some of the top headlines from around the world

Hamad Airport Demo bot A demo to show how airports can use bots to make passengers’ lives easier

API feature explainer bot A meta bot that explains how the API integration feature works in the TARS builder

Bitcoin explainer A brief bitcoin explainer in bot form. We converted information from this video, into the bot to show that conversational interfaces could be used to explain concepts in an engaging way

AirBnB pitch bot A demo we built to show how bots could be a more interactive way to pitch a company

Chat to AK An example of how politicians could engage better with voters using bots

In total, these bots have had over 80,000 submissions and counting

If you want to see my written content check out the TARS blog over here. Most of the content over there was written by me. If you are looking for specifics, check out this piece for longform example (I wrote a few thousand words on why and how restaurants can use chatbots), or check out this piece for something short (it discusses, why India is poised for chat based businesses).

Anyways, I am opening a thread here on the encouragement of @ish and @vinit, who suggested that people might have some questions about how I go about building bots/creating content.

Feel free to ask me anything below, I’ll respond as soon as I can.

Best,
Arnav

PS. IF ANY OF YOU NEED A BOT CREATED, FEEL FREE TO CONTACT ME OVER HERE.

4 Likes

Hi there.I see the use of gifts to increase the attention.I was thinking of this, and I believe that is a great idea.Also, i plan to change them depending on the season.For example, this week concentrate on placing something related to love.

1 Like

Thanks for your work, @arnav! I’ve started following through some of the TARS lab experiments to included some cool functionality into my government bot. I built this ticketing system as a demo based on numerous API tutorials. Everything is running on free accounts currently (except for the TARS bots of course).
https://botz.hellotars.com/conv/SyTXqP/?_startgid=300
The only addition I’d like to add is the ability for users to change their email address. I asked Vinit for a tutorial on overwriting existing data on a Google Sheet, but I understand everyone is very busy. Anyway, take a peek and let me know what you think. My favorite part is the auto-generated email that offers an link that insta-checks your status. On that note, everyone that tests must use their legit email so they get the full experience.

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@arnav, i am curious to know how have you managed, in DeCaprio bot, to have those Project Cards showing only the unclicked ones : after clicking on one of them, only the remainder 2 then 1 (only the unclicked ones remains visible) !