We’ve all heard the recent hype around “dialog is the new interface”, and many of you have probably played around with building a chatbot – some may even have them deployed in the wild.

In this presentation, we reflect on the last 18 months of building and running a chatbot based business with tens of thousands of active users, and several thousand concurrent users a day. We’ll talk through the technical, conversation design, and content challenges, and many other things that we’ve learnt the hard way; often the unexpected consequences of blurring the line between a human and automated service. We will also dive into the principles we’ve learnt make an engaging chatbot, based on our experience and experiments.