Kore Bots Competitive Comparison Overview Kore Bots Competitive Comparison Overview 1
Kore Bots Competitive Comparison Overview Kore The intelligent Bots for the Enterprise Introduction Bots have officially hit the enterprise and consumer arena, but do you have the tools you need to build virtual assistants for your customers? What if you want to build intelligent assistants for your customers and your workforce using the same tools and platform? This document highlights some key differentiators that make Kore the superior solution for building, hosting, and using intelligent and versatile bots. We compare the Kore Bots with team messaging apps (, ), bot builder or conversation UX platforms (, ), and Facebook s Messenger (Bots for Messenger/ Bot Engine) by examining the following criteria: 1. Bot Capabilities: What can bots do for your employees and customers? Does the solution allow you to link multiple bots together under multi-purpose universal bots and unite fragmented business systems? 2. Be-Everywhere Bots: Can each solution operate across multiple communication channels? Can you interact with custom bots on your website or mobile app? 3. Bot Builder Tools & Comprehensive : Does the solution provide a comprehensive web-based Bot Builder tool and a framework for creating custom bots quickly and easily? Can you access an ever-growing network of ready-to-use bots, so your employees to get up and running quickly? 4. Support for Natural Language Processing: Are bots powered by NLP for conversational use via speech and text. Do bots create a personal user experience? Do bots learn and grow in accuracy and ability the more they re used? 5. Enterprise Control & Administration: What security and compliance measures are in place for bots? Can you easily track bot usage so you can compile stronger insights? 2
Kore Bots Competitive Comparison Overview The Kore Advantage: Bots as the Future of Work and Play Kore s Bot gives employees, teams, and customers the power to interact with intelligent ready-to-use and custom bots on nearly any system, app, or device., Kore meets the most stringent security and compliance requirements. It provides all the tools and building blocks developers need to easily create intelligent bots. And it makes work simple for your employees and brings your brand to life. With Kore s Bot, you can: INCREASE organizational efficiency and worker productivity by giving your employees their very own virtual assistants that can deliver personalized and relevant updates, complete tasks, and generate system reports for them EXPAND the reach of your brand by engaging with your customers in a consistent and intuitive manner across all touch points - from email to text to mobile apps to your website SIMPLIFY the processes of interacting with complex enterprise systems with state-of-theart Natural Language Processing for speech and text REDUCE spending on custom apps by giving your developers the tools, framework, and execution model they need to easily build, host, and deploy intelligent and versatile custom bots ENSURE that your employees and cross-functional teams have the business systems they need, when they need them, with an ever-growing network of 100+ ready-to-use bots from popular enterprise and consumer apps and systems MAXIMIZE security with cutting-edge encryption and enterprise-grade compliance and administration for all Kore Bot messages Kore: Enterprise and Consumer Bots Innovative companies are creating higher customer expectations and increasing competition in the global marketplace. Kore s Bots empowers you to simplify the way your employees work and create engaging self-service digital experiences for your customers. Kore s Bots are also for everyone - from the individuals and teams that makes up your workforce to all your business and personal customers. Other solutions, however, focus on providing developers with the tools they need to build either consumer-focused bots or enterprise-focused bots that are largely limited to a single platform. This forces you to turn to other solutions or platforms to transform the way your employees interact with the systems and apps they use everyday. With Kore, you ll get all the tools you need to transform the workplace and create the kind of unforgettable customer experiences that build customer loyalty, all backed by enterprise-grade control and security you can rely on. Why use multiple platforms when you can do it all with one? 3
Kore Bots Competitive Comparison Overview Why Kore? A Feature-By-Feature Comparison Bot Capabilities Receive alerts and notifications from external systems via bots as a team inside rooms, keeping your teams up to date with the latest developments Receive alerts and notifications from external systems via bots as an individual, giving you the information you need when you need it Boost individual and team productivity by directing bots to complete routine actions (like filing a JIRA ticket) in third-party systems Direct bots to deliver on-demand system reports or other structured information through messages with support for a report UI widget Automate routine workflows and build multi step flows by mapping specific bot actions to alerts or actions to actions Link multiple bots together under a universal bot, allowing users to multitask using multiple systems in one conversation x x 3 x 4 x x x x 3 4 x x Partial 1 x 3 x 5 x x Partial 2 x 3 x 5 x x x x x 5 x x x x x 5 1. The requires developers to write code to connect the web service to an external app and to enable natural language processing. 2. The requires developers to write code for report querying. It does not offer UI rendering capabilities for reports. 3. provides the tools needed to create intents and entities. They also offer domains, which are pre-defined knowledge packages that can make your agent (bot) understand thousands of diverse requests without the need for coding. Command targets, such as direct actions or report tasks in Kore, are based on custom implementations using their SDKs, such as the actions already available to a bot or mobile app. The available domains only provide the tools for learning requests and completing customer focused tasks such as turning off wifi or getting the stock price for a company. 4. Available evidence suggests that Facebook s bots will be primarily used to perform customer-focused tasks such as making a restaurant reservation, calling a cab, getting breaking news, and more. These bots can respond to user requests with structured messages, which are messages that can contain text, images, links, and call to action buttons. 5. No evidence could be found that this feature will be available in the first (non beta) release. 4
Kore Bots Competitive Comparison Overview Be-Everywhere Bots: Bot Availability Across Communication Channels Client Adapters: Interact with custom bots in virtually any communication channel - from the places your employees interact to the web pages your customers browse Kore Email SMS Skype Web/iOS/Android Roadmap: Telegram Groupme x () x () Email SMS Skype Telegram Groupme Assistant.ai Alexa Cortana Facebook x 2 Web Chat Widget: Make your website interactive and increase user engagement via an embeddable chat widget that allows your customers to interact with intelligent bots in realtime x x x x 3 Client SDKs: Bots can be hosted or embedded into websites, ios apps, and Android apps via SDK and Kore s API Web SDK w/ Chat Widget ios SDK Android SDK x x x Android 1 ios Mac OSX Apple Watch x 2 1. also offers SDKs for Cordova, JavaScript, Node,js, C#.NET, Unity, Xamarin, Python, and Ruby and example libraries for HTML and C++. 2. No evidence could be found that this feature will be available in the first (non beta) release. 3. Early use cases show that Facebook will add live chat web plugins that redirect users from a website to Messenger to chat with bots or live operators. The first, a send to messenger plugin, allows a business to initiate a conversation with that customer inside Messenger. The second, a message us plugin, takes the desktop customer directly to messenger.com and a mobile web user to the Messenger native app. They will also offer messenger codes that people can scan with their mobile device to start a conversation with you or your bot. Kore s powerful Web Chat Widget and Client SDKs t doesn t require customers to leave your website or mobile app. They can interact with directly with your brand in a consistent and intuitive manner across all touch points. 5
Kore Bots Competitive Comparison Overview Bot Builder Tools & Comprehensive Quickly and easily create intelligent bots that integrate with third-party apps and systems via a web-based tool, framework, and execution model with zero coding or custom software Save time by utilizing an ever-growing network of 100+ ready-to-use bots or other integrations from popular enterprise systems via a dedicated Bot Store x x 1 Partial 3 Partial 4 Partial 2 x 5 1. Microsoft s Bot requires developers to spend time writing code to create their own bots using various components of the framework. 2. The provides a Bot Directory as a key component of the offering. This directory is coming soon. They are currently offering a small selection of sample bots from Build 2016. 3. provides tools that allow developers to design and integrate speech interfaces into apps and hardware devices and not full-feature bots like Kore. They offer voice recognition, natural language processing, and text-to-speech capabilities. offers a broad range of knowledge bases known as domains that provide information for building intelligent speech interfaces such as encyclopedic knowledge, language translation, weather, and more. 4. Available evidence suggests that Facebook will provide developers with a framework and some tools for building bots with their Bot Engine. The Bot Engine is based on their earlier acquisition of Wit.ai and relies on machine learning. Developers will be able to create their own bots or work with Facebook s different bot-building partners. 5. Available evidence suggests that Facebook will release a bot store for its messenger. Facebook will also offer the ability to search for bots, a featured bot section, plugins, scannable codes, and links. It will also offer customer matching, which will allow you to initiate conversations via bots with users if you have their phone number and their consent to be contacted. 6
Kore Bots Competitive Comparison Overview Support for Natural Language Processing Built-in support for natural language processing Third Party 1 x 2 3 5 Support for prebuilt entities Date/ Time/ Starting Date/ Time Ending Date Time Country Names City Names Phone Number Address Email Number Range Low Number Range High Number Time Duration Measurement Unit Money Zipcode Person Names (commonly Used Names) Company Names Other Proper Names Twitter Handles Hashtag Labels Labels Description Password Remainder of Sentence After a Specifi Word (e.g. Tweet) x x Date/ Time Number Ordinal Money Encyclopedia Age Geography Percentage URL Color Date/ Color Email Geography Names Music - Artist Music - Genre Numbers Amounts with Units (Length, Speed, etc) Unit Names (Currency Name) UKN Support for custom entities Dictate text and converse with bots via built-in speech recognition DISC x x LUIS GUI Tool 4 UKN x x UKN 6 7
Kore Bots Competitive Comparison Overview 1. users typically communicate and interact with bots via slash commands. Some third parties offer integrations for adding NLP capabilities to custom bots. 2. Microsoft requires users to utilize their Language Understanding Intelligent Service to add natural language capabilities to custom bots. 3. offers tools for adding voice recognition, natural language understanding, and text-to-speech capabilities to your apps. 4. Developers using can create their own custom entities for their agents via web forms, uploading them in JSON or CSV formats, or API calls. 5. Facebook recently announced the beta launch of Bot Engine based on Wit.ai s work, an artificial intelligence tool for teaching chatbots what to say in different situations. Available evidence suggests that bots for messenger will use some form of natural language processing to respond to users and will use a combination of conversation and UI to respond and complete tasks for users. 6. No evidence could be found that this feature will be available in the first (non beta) release. It is likely, however, that they will offer some form of voice interface and speech recognition based on the work of Wit.ai. Wit.ai has tools for building voice interfaces and an intent parser using voice or text. 8
Kore Bots Competitive Comparison Overview Enterprise Control & Administration Cloud Connector: Connect bots to on-premise custom and third-party systems that sit behind your firewall x x x 1 3 x 1 Centralized admin controls for enterprise and team leaders to manage bots, determine bot availability for users and groups, and more x x x 1 x 1 x 1 Built-in usage metrics for bots and comprehensive event tracking x x Partial 2 x 1 UKN 4 Enterprise-grade compliance for bot messages including customizable data retention policies and support for data exports x x x 1 x 1 x 1 1. No evidence could be found that this feature is available. 2. Bots created with the and that are hosted in Azure can link their bot to Azure Application Insights analytics from the Bot Connector dashboard. Microsoft also offers support for integration with other analytics tools for measuring bot usage. 3. offers an on-premise feature that allows your app to talk on your servers through their Preferred pricing plan. 4. Facebook offers Facebook Analytics for Apps that provides administrators with audience insights like usage, general, education, and more. It is likely that they will offer usage metrics and insights for bots as a facet of the Messenger or as a tie-in with their current analytics dashboards. About Kore Kore s revolutionary platform streamlines business workflows and communications with a single message based interface. With Kore s powerful bots, users can both receive alerts from the systems they use and send information back to those systems from a message. Kore provides robust administrative features and enterprise-grade security to comply with regulatory mandates. To learn more about how Kore is simplifying the way people work, visit kore.com or call 844-USE-KORE. 7380 2016 W. Kore, Sand Inc. Lake All Rd., rights Suite reserved. 430 Orlando, FL 32819 +1 321.420.0990 info@kore.com www.kore.com 9