2020 is Talk-A-Bot’s third complete business year. It’s not a long time, but there have been significant changes in the chatbot market. The chatbot hype cycle has passed its peak and the bots finally reached the real business usability phase where it’s possible to decide on implementation based on real return on investment.

At the end of 2016, Business Insider’ article made a great impression on us. The article stated that according to Ovum’s research, 80% of companies plan to introduce chatbots by 2020. Despite that, it’s still unclear to many companies whether their clients would like to chat or not. Naturally, there are still more than 10 months until the end of 2020, but according to current statistics, chatbot presence will not even reach 50% in the communication between businesses and their clients.

How come chatbots haven’t become as wide-spread as they predicted in 2016?

– The market is flooded with lousy chatbots that are not developed with a consistent technological- and communication concept in mind. Because of this, many believe(d) that chatbots are not smart enough yet. Luckily, most chatbot development companies that built bots like this have gone bankrupt or started doing something else.

– Facebook’s reputation was damaged by significant data leaks and security scandals, which affected the business use of the Messenger platform. This is also most likely the reason why the most popular chat platform, WhatsApp still hasn’t appeared with a usable chatbot API on the market to this day. It seems that this problem will be resolved by May 2020 and new markets will open suddenly thanks to a usable WhatsApp chatbot API.

– Focusing on the Central-European region, it’s a serious constraining factor that language processing technologies are limited to a few very widely spoken languages only. Furthermore, these services are either public cloud-based (security risk) or really expensive. This is why Talk-A-Bot decided to make it its goal to build multilanguage, safe chatbots for corporations.

The year 2019 was much like a roller coaster from the viewpoint of the Talk-A-Bot office

– At the end of 2018 we secured our first capital investment, thanks to which we could start the year with a rush. We started business development using our own resources in Poland, Germany, The Netherlands and with the Singapore office in Southeast-Asia (launch)

– As for the organization, by June we’ve grown from 30 people to 50 people, so there were many ongoing internal trainings, processes and developments. (ascending)

– We formed a dedicated product development team, who work at full capacity on our product CHEQ in order to deliver the internal business communication’s most effective tool. (speeding)

– Talk-A-Bot’s language processing technology has reached such a level of development that it can provide a consistent 90-95% answer accuracy rate to our clients. (spinning)

– We developed and started a new business development channel, through which even consultants with less technical knowledge can distribute CHEQ. (we look to the side and see that others are enjoying the ride as well)

– By Autumn it has become clear that because of the drawn-out sales processes and after the organizational growth, it’s time to tighten the belt. The team once again became smaller than 35 people. (plunging upside down)

– By December our development and sales processes payed off. It could have come earlier, but we were still happy regardless. (arriving at the station in one piece)

– We got many awards and recognition throughout the year, but we’re the only ones concerned about that, so we won’t list them. (seeing the mid-ride photo in the souvenir shop on the way out)

We start 2020 with renewed vigour, a new organization and a stable supporting background, which we can talk about in a few weeks in much greater detail. We’re absolutely stoked because this is really exciting. Our goal is to become Hungary’s and Poland’s market-leading chatbot company – in every sense. Regarding our product CHEQ, we built the most effective tool for internal company communication, which can be experienced by approximately 50,000 employees, based on our signed orders. Thanks to our indirect sales programme we started building new markets, which can put us into – in the wording of Tesla – “ludicrous” mode, instead of the rollercoaster. To those that like secrets: we like coffee and beer, but not mixed.