Tag Archives: bots

bots, Business, JavaScript

Streamline Engineering Updates with Slack to Notion Bot

There’s been a lot of noise lately about productivity tools and the “perfect” engineering workflow.
Let’s slow down and separate what actually works from what just creates more overhead.

Here’s a boring truth: Slack is incredible for quick, ephemeral communication.
Here’s a less comfortable truth: It is an absolute nightmare as a system of record.

If you lead an engineering team or run a startup, you probably have a #daily-updates or #eod-reports channel.
The theory is sound.

Everyone drops a quick note at the end of the day: what they shipped, what blocked them, what’s next.

But here is what actually happens:

Those updates get posted.
Someone replies with an emoji.
A thread erupts about a weird bug in production.
Someone posts a picture of their dog.

By Friday, when you’re trying to answer a simple question—“What did we actually accomplish this week?”—those reports are buried under a mountain of noise.

You find yourself scrolling endlessly.
It’s exhausting.
And it doesn’t scale. Not to mention that if you will need SOC-2 (and you will 🙂 ) –> you can’t say “we have everything in Slack”

Why not just force everyone into Jira or Linear?

You could.
But engineers hate context-switching just to write a status update.
Slack is where the conversation is happening.
The friction to post there is zero.

The problem isn’t the input. The problem is the storage.

So I (=Gemini+Claude) built a bridge.

Meet the Slack → Notion EOD Sync Bot

I got tired of losing track of momentum, so I wrote a bot that does the tracking for us.

It’s a lightweight NodeJS service that automatically extracts End-of-Day reports from Slack and structures them beautifully in a Notion database.

Continue reading →
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An Amazing Apps For The Google Assistant – Chatbot Summit 2018

chat Bot Summit

Here are the slides from my talk today at the Chat Bot Summit.

It was a great experience to talk about the Google Assistant platform and to run two workshops with live coding.

If you could not make it and you wish to test this platform, you can go over the slides (and other tutorials or videos) and check on of the code labs that we have for the Assistant on your own.

There are many good apps that you can check in order to get ideas and inspiration. Here are some apps for the Assistant that I’ve created for the code labs and demos.

Good luck!

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How To Create A Shortcut In Google Assistant?

When you are using the google assistant for common task on daily basis it’s great to make a shortcut so with one word you can invoke a long ‘command’. One of the first shortcuts I have created is ‘bitcoin’ which is translated to “OK google, talk to bitcoin info about the price”. Let’s see below how you can easily work with the shortcuts inside the Google Assistant. See in the short video below how to create it and use it.

 

Continue reading →

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Voice User Interface Design

We are all experts at human-to-human conversation. But conversing only seems easy because it’s familiar, you’ve been doing it since you were born.  The key to building a good voice interface is to not fall into the trap of simply converting a GUI into a VUI.

In the slides below, I will cover the best practices to design our Action on Google (and any other Voice UI).

You can also see the top tips in the short video below. Continue reading →

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The Google Assistant Macro View

Screen Shot 2017-10-17 at 11.37.02 AMThe past few years, the buzz about conversational experiences and digital assistants has increased dramatically. According to a recently issued report by eMarketer, 87% of B2C marketers in the US believe that chatbots and digital assistants will play a significant role in marketing before 2021. Conversational computing and digital assistants represent a new fundamental computing wave.

Why?

There are two forces:

  • Natural Language Processing – The dramatic improvements in natural language processing, natural language understanding and machine learning, enable us to offer users engaging, natural conversational experiences that are far from the call center menus or the awkward chat bots of the past.
  • Conversation-first platforms – We can see today many platforms that support this new capabilities (e.g. smartphones, messaging apps, voice-activated speakers, watches, cars etc’). They have become increasingly mainstream, increasing familiarity with digital assistants and encouraging users to engage with them.

In these slides we will cover the big picture and why companies will wish to build an app for the Google Assistant. Continue reading →

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Use The Google Assistant To Remember Stuff

You can use the Google Assistant to remember lots of useful things for you.
For example, where you parked you car. It’s true that you might have this feature in your maps app.
However, this one can take a step further and help you remember its location better (e.g. I parked my car on level four near the elevator).

How?

You need to open the Google Assistant and turn on the location settings.

  1. On your phone, open the Settings app Settings.
  2. Under “Personal,” tap Location.
  3. Turn on location .

After that, you can say something like: Continue reading →

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OK Google Talk To Runner Trivia Game

Last week, I had some time to do some fun stuff with Actions on Google. The result is a new trivia game for runners and people that like to learn new things.

I used the new templates for Google assistant app. It’s super easy, all you need is to copy a google sheet and update it with your questions and answers.

Got a topic you are passion about? Give it a try!

You can see below how a typical game will look like on the assistant. But it’s also fun to play it on Google Home.

You start by calling the game with something like “OK Google, talk to runner trivia game“. Continue reading →

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How To Publish An Assistant App That Will Pass The Review?

After you’ve designed conversations and developed apps, you’re probably ready to share them with users. Before you make your app available to Google Assistant users, let’s see how to prepare for deployment. When you submit your app for approval, Google tests and verifies that they meet a minimal set of launch requirements before publishing them to users.

In this video and post we will focus on the top 3 pitfalls you need to avoid in order to pass the review process.

Continue reading →

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How To Set Reminders With The Google Assistant?

Screenshot 2017-07-27 10.06.15

One of the really useful features and ‘a bit’ unknown is the assistant ability to remind us stuff. You can think on it as an effect way to take a short note on anything that you don’t wish to forget.

How?

You can say something like:

  • OK, Google, remind me to go for a run tomorrow at 6:30am
  • OK Google, set a reminder to call dad tonight
  • Hey Google, set a reminder to do laundry when I get home

In order to see which reminders we already ‘booked’ you can say:

  • OK, Google, what are my reminders?”
  • OK, Google, what are my reminders for tomorrow?

And if you wish to remove a reminder(s) – “OK, Google, delete my reminders for tomorrow”. You can also delete everything with “OK, Google, delete all of my reminders”.

The nice aspect of reminders is that on the phone (Android, iPhone) you will get a push notification and on Google Home it will just tell you it.

Give it a try!

google-home

 

 

 

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Create A Google Assistant App That Use Your Server

The Google Assistant give users their own personal Google that helps them find, organize, and get things done in their world. The main way users interact with the Google Assistant is by carrying on a conversation with it. You can extend the Google Assistant by building apps that let users get things done with your products and services.

In this post, we are going to build a new app for the Google Assistant that will give us the current bitcoin price. The main idea here is to show how to use external services from an Assistant app.

If you prefer a video, you can watch the one below:

and I also wrote a code lab so you could test it on your own with code.

Continue reading →

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