04 May 2018

#GoTBot chatbot awards

Winter is coming, and we're buzzing from our recent awards success.

Our friendly Game of Thrones Facebook Messenger chatbot was designed to help guide fans through the series and we couldn’t be more chuffed that it’s been recognised for it’s innovation and creative use of AI technology.

GoTBoT has won numerous awards and commendations including;

Shorty Awards
- Silver Award in the "Humour Category"
- "Audience Award", a real honour to get this one

Social Buzz Awards
- Commendation for "Best Use of a Chatbot"

DADI Awards
- Commendation for "Viral Campaign"
- Commendation for "In-House Campaign"

In a world of direwolves, white walkers and dragons, there’s one thing missing: bots! Meet GoTBot, a friendly Facebook chatbot with answers to all of your Game of Thrones questions.

We created GoTBot as a Facebook Messenger chatbot in solidarity with all the secondary characters you forgot about, plus all the titles and heirs that you never knew existed. It’s for those of you who realise that, in fact, you know nothing.

Start a conversation with GoTBot in the Facebook Messenger app and ask it a question about any Game of Thrones character. For example, “Who is Varys?” will result in a photo of Varys, his title and all sorts of other juicy information about the Master of Whisperers. The “Dead or Alive” feature will come in handy when you just can’t remember if that one forgotten Tully is dead yet.

But don’t underestimate GoTBot… It knows more than you expect. Just try asking about Daenerys and Jon Snow’s (possible? probable?) relationship. Everyone’s entitled to their Game of Thrones theories...

It all started from a simple “Dead or Alive” Game of Thrones question around the studio. If only there was someone who had all the answers. Wait a minute....

GoTBot is designed as a useful tool, but it quickly grew into an entertaining digital friend. Popular Google searches related to Game of Thrones shaped GoTBot so that he answers the most pressing questions, but is also learning every day through the magic of AI.

The A.I. of natural language processing of GoTBot is handled by the Wit.ai service. We begin by teaching Wit.ai example questions and, as we feed it information, it learns to understand the users intent. When the user asks a question, Wit.ai recognises the intent of what the user is searching for then our vast GoT database gets to work and answers the user in an intelligent and useful manner as possible, with a bit of humour thrown in to keep it interesting.

Discussing the launch, Catch’s Founder and Managing Director, Jonathan Smith said:

"With 1.2 billion monthly active users on Facebook Messenger, the potential audience for chatbots is huge. We knew we wanted to create a Facebook chatbot and wanted to get our clients excited about the future of AI and how it might benefit their business. What better way to do so than creating our very own chatbot? And who doesn’t like Game of Thrones?”

GoTBot's popularity is growing, he's already been featured on Mashable, The Verge, AdWeek, Creativity and Esquire magazine.

To meet GoTBot - The Game of Thrones Chatbot, visit him on Facebook http://m.me/G0TB0T

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06 Dec 2016

SES: Drupal 8, front-end teardown

We’ve just designed and built a new website for the world-leading satellite operator, SES. SES connects and enables broadcast, telecom, corporate and government customers, and enriches the lives of billions of people worldwide.

We’re really proud of how it’s turned out, and as it’s one of the first batch of high-profile large Drupal 8 websites, we’ve been asked by a wide range of people about our technical approach to building a complex site using the latest version of Drupal.

You can read our case study here on the project as a whole, but here is Stuart Wilson, Head of Frontend Development at Catch to explain a little more around our front-end approach:

“The sheer scale of the SES website demanded a scalable and comprehensive front end system. As a team we approached the transition from design to code by creating a static style guide of individual components which would then be used to power the Drupal 8 website.

Our modular CSS was written in SASS using NPM to run build scripts and wrapping it up with PostCSS’ Autoprefixer for greater resilience to browser inconsistencies. Using BEM syntax and championing an OOCSS approach allowed us to write configurable componentry which was open to extension, but closed to core modification which meant that QA testing could happen earlier on in the build.

“The sheer scale of the SES website demanded a scalable and comprehensive front end system."

STUART WILSON, HEAD OF FRONT END DEVELOPMENT AT CATCH

Thanks to Drupal 8’s use of the Twig templating engine, we could test the flexibility of our HTML templates using mock data which was then swappable for real content from the CMS. This created a unified theming workflow with clear ownership between the front and back end of the website and helped reduce code overhead whilst instilling scalability within the UI.

Thanks to our modular approach, we were able to utilise Drupal Paragraphs to promote greater flexibility across content types in the CMS, enabling SES to realise any combination of page designs they required.”

Visit www.ses.com and stay tuned for future SES developments. We’re continuing to work with the team in Luxembourg on increased website functionality and a range of other exciting digital products.