Abwid goes public

In 2015, while exploring chat bots, I got the idea behind Abwid: a platform where anyone can build his/her own assistant. Siri, Google Now, Cortana, Amazon Alexa, Facebook M, all these seemed to point to one simple fact: Assistants are the next big thing. So I thought, how can artificial assistants help us in ways other than assisting the user with information available on the web. And the result was Abwid: assistants helping others by providing information about the user.

In October 2015, I implemented a very simple (invitation-only) platform, called Abwid. Today, Abwid goes public. While this might seem like a small deal on the outside, the changes are much bigger on the inside. Earlier, Abwid was invitation-based for the following reason: the backend created an individual assistant for each user, which needed some manual inputs from my side. Now, a common platform lies behind all the assistants, powered by a common model. And this means: a simple improvement to the backend, improves the performance of each assistant. Which gives us the following benefit: inclusion of new Iotas to the platform is now much easier.

The public release of Abwid comes along with a bunch of improvements.

Let’s enumerate on these improvements.

Abwid arrives on Facebook Messenger

Many users complained about a single issue. I (can’t/won’t) embed Abwid on my homepage. Now that there’s the same platform on the backend, all the Abwids can easily arrive on any service with a single account. As a start, Abwid comes on Messenger. Go to http://m.me/abwidapp to get started. In the future, Abwid is planned to arrive on many other platforms: a common assistant for every purpose is the ultimate goal.

Keyword Rules

Now you can add iotas which trigger a response if a keyword phrase is present in the guest query. These can be helpful when you want your Abwid to provide information about some things which are associated to you. The possibilities are endless.

Quick Feedback

Now you can mark any Abwid response as incorrect by a single click. And with the help of the new platform, Abwid can easily be trained to handle the associated query correctly in the future. This will also help the addition of new Iotas.

Notifications

A user can now turn off notifications which arrive when some guest wants to have a live chat or leave some message.

Dashboard Improvements

There are many small improvements in the Dashboard. For example, there’s now a search input available in each tab.

Fictional Abwids

I am planning to add some fun fictional assistants in the coming days. These can correspond to either fictional characters or famous celebrities.

If you are excited about the idea, go ahead and create an account on abwid to explore Abwid (abwid.com). Any feedback/suggestion is much appreciated.