Voice and Chatbot Creators Get Behind $BOT Coin with New Use Cases

BOT Coin was officially introduced to conversational AI professionals yesterday with a spotlight on four of the largest community groups in our industry (Modev/Voice Summit, VoiceBrew, #VoiceLunch, and Voicebot.ai). Today, we are focusing on four builders of conversational AI experiences that are also committed to using $BOT Coin to reward users and add new features: Announcr, Chatables, SleepJar, and Jovo.

$BOT Coin Use Cases

The two most frequent questions I receive about $BOT Coin are “What is it?” and “How does it work?” Hopefully, those questions were answered relatively well in yesterday’s article. The next most common question is, “What are the use cases?” We outlined a few of those yesterday as well. Modev is going to offer bonuses of $BOT to sponsors and enable individuals to attend events using their $BOT. VoiceBrew will use $BOT as a reward for newsletter referrals from readers. #VoiceLunch is already using $BOT to reward community participation and contributions. Voicebot is using it as a reward mechanism for Voice Insider subscribers and has other products in the works that will be $BOT-specific.

Tipping, Appreciation, and Collaboration

Some of the builders we are highlighting today have their own use case ideas. “Sending $BOT Coin is a fantastic way to thank members of the open-source developer community for their contributions or to show appreciation for business mentors,” said Nick Schwab, founder and CEO of Sleep Jar.

The latter use case mentioned by Nick is often referred to as “tipping” in other contexts. People are providing a service or content free-of-charge and the beneficiary decides to give them a small tip as a sign of appreciation. Amy Stapleton, co-founder of Chatables, is also interested in implementing this feature.

I like the idea of a shared ‘rewards currency’ that can be used across the voice industry. We can use the currency among voice professionals to tip each other for helping out with design or technical challenges.

Jan König and Alex Swetlow are co-founders of Jovo, the leading open-source framework for building voice AI experiences. They began using $BOT today as a reward that recognizes Jovo’s “Community Member of the Month.” Mark Tucker of Two Voice Devs and Speech Markdown fame was this month’s honoree.

$BOT to Incentivize App Trial

A key challenge that many voice app and chatbot developers face is first building awareness and then converting that into trial by new users. Stapleton sees a role for $BOT here in commenting, “In the future, we could potentially use $BOT Coin to encourage new people to try specific voice apps or to build a community around voice experiences.”

This is one area where a “community coin” versus an individual-specific “creator coin” provides greater benefits. Offering a loyalty coin to someone that knows nothing about you will not be much of an incentive. However, if a user is familiar with $BOT Coin because they use it in another voice app or chatbot, it may be an immediate incentive. They already have context about what the coin is and represents. Most likely, they also have a positive association with $BOT that can transfer over to the new conversational AI app creator. This mechanic can reduce friction associating with inducing trial and also target users that already have a track record of enjoying chatbots and voice apps.

It has the huge benefit of being exchangeable with other $BOT holders. If I made my own point system or virtual currency to do microtransactions, it wouldn’t be exchangeable.

Dave Young, founder of Rev4 Media, and creator of Announcrbot, commented, “It has the huge benefit of being exchangeable with other $BOT holders. If I made my own point system or virtual currency to do microtransactions, it wouldn’t be exchangeable. The $BOT community is itself comprised of communities who are loyal to influencers in the space to publishers, developers, and platform creators. It can benefit tremendously from a scalable network effect. This will give $BOT holders more opportunities to be used in products built by those other publishers and builders.”

One hypothesis about the conversational AI app user base, in particular, is that there is little overlap of audiences between the available voice apps and also between chatbots. The fastest way to grow may be simply identifying those users that already like this form of conversational experience and introduce them to your voice app or chatbot. This can generally work in the conversational AI space because it is not a zero-sum market. Using one new conversational AI app rarely displaces another. These experiences tend to be complementary and non-competitive.

Using $BOT in Conversational AI Experiences

Another popular use case that many people are working towards is implementing $BOT directly into the mechanics of conversational AI experiences. The ability to execute micro-transactions and nano-transactions with no transaction fees in $BOT-t0-$BOT exchanges has sparked several new ideas.

“Micro-transactions lower the risk for users and increase the incentive to create good content. Right now, there is no viable way to charge someone under $0.50; transaction processing fees make it infeasible. With $BOT, we can sell something for a quarter, a penny, or even less. This enables many more kinds of use cases than the traditional $1.99, $9.99 in-app-purchase,” said Dave Young, founder of Rev4 Media, and creator of Announcrbot.

Young added, “$BOT will be the currency of choice for our Creator Program, which enables people to create monetizable channels of short-form audio content for music, motivation, advice, instruction, news, entertainment, well-being, etc. AnnouncrBots will be able to subscribe to those channels and create custom playlists of content that matches the needs of each day, designed to bring positivity and delight when the AnnouncrBot plays the audio out loud. We will use $BOT to reward creators for subscriptions to their channels as well as when any piece of their content is played outside of their channel.”

Jan König of Jovo added, “We also plan to build an integration so that $BOT transactions can be added to Jovo apps.” Some of these features are early in their development. However, developers such as Dave Young along with dev communities like Jovo are already building some of the infrastructure that will enable new types of in-app experiences. Developers can get involved now to shape the direction of those features and get early access.

What will you do with $BOT Coin?

$BOT Coin is designed to be flexible. When we created the coin on Rally.io (more on Rally in yesterday’s article), several of us gathered as a community and decided on a simple summary: “BOT Coin is used by a global community of bot creators to reward users and create fans while facilitating human-to-bot and bot-to-bot interactions.” I will add to that human-to-human and bot-to-human interactions which you can see manifested in some of the examples listed above. We always knew we could not anticipate all of the use cases and many more are showing up each week.

So, whether you are a developer, designer, influencer, or fall into some other conversational AI category, you are welcome to use $BOT Coin to build loyalty, reward contributors, or add new features to your voice or chatbot experience. If you have some interesting use cases to implement we will try to get you some coverage as well which might just get you a high-quality backlink and higher awareness. You should follow @BOTcoinAI on Twitter for the latest updates and you can also ask questions there via direct message. Plus we have a Discord server for creators. The resources will be growing as the community evolves.

Jan König of Jovo summed up the culture of our industry and the role of $BOT Coin recently when he said:

One of the things I’ve always loved about the voice industry is the community. People care a lot about the overall goal and do their best to help everyone succeed. I believe that this can be taken to the next level with $BOT, a layer that facilitates collaboration across the industry.

Follow @bretkinsella Follow @voicebotai

Introducing BOT Coin, a new tool for the voice and chatbot communities