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

Related news and work

Game of Thrones chatbot

Catch

Meet the multi-award winning GoTBot, a friendly Facebook chatbot with answers to all of your Game of Thrones questions

CR7 Challenge

Cristiano Ronaldo Fragrances

What better way of getting fans excited than with a challenge from Cristiano Ronaldo himself?

Putting the fun back into flying

Thomas Cook Airlines

Putting the fun back into flying via clever content for a UK brand favourite

21 Feb 2016

Can you use Drupal 8 yet?

Hi, I’m Robyn and I’ve been a Drupal Developer Apprentice at Catch for three months.

As developers, modules are crucial to everything we do. They help manage media and content across complex sites, they simplify back-end processes and PHP development, and they help implement complex components and features across sites in a matter of minutes where they’d normally take hours. They are the bread-and-butter of Drupal development, and without stable modules available our job would be very, very difficult.

As such, when Drupal 8 was released we took a special interest in the state of module development. Because Drupal 7 has benefitted from more than 5 years of contribution and development from the Drupal community, Drupal 7 is an incredibly stable and powerful platform.

We’ve been a bit spoiled, and despite the really amazing changes and improvements that we’ve been promised with Drupal 8, we were hesitant to jump on the bandwagon until we’d done a bit more research on what modules were really available for use.

So, back in early December (shortly after Drupal 8 was released) I started to track the development status of modules in Drupal 8. I put together a list of the most-used Drupal modules and examined each module’s development status.

Here's what I found:

Status of Drupal’s top 25 most-used modules (Dec 2015):

In Core: 7

Stable: 5

Percent Usable: 48%

In Alpha & Beta: 3

Unstable: 7

Unavailable: 3

Percent Unusable: 52%

If I’m 100% honest, I was pretty stunned at these numbers. With only 48% of Drupal’s most-used modules available at the time, it seemed that developing a complex site in Drupal 8 would have been a worrying prospect, given the inherent stability of Drupal 7.

This was a disappointing outcome - we really wanted to start building in Drupal 8 but it just wasn’t ready for us!

Given the dedicated and active Drupal community, I was curious to see how quickly things would improve. I figured it was just a matter of time before more people started getting involved.

And so, three months have passed since that initial review and now, with Drupal Camp London just around the corner (Mar 4th - 6th), I thought it would be a good time to take another look.

Status of Drupal’s top 25 most-used modules (Feb 2016):

In Core: 11

Stable: 6

Percent Usable: 68%

In Alpha & Beta: 4

Unstable: 4

Unavailable: 0

Percent Unusable: 32%

These results represent a 20% increase in the availability of Drupal’s top-modules within just a three month time frame.

While that number may not sound terribly impressive at first glance, it represents a significant effort on behalf of the Drupal community to get Drupal 8 up-and-running.

As Drupal is completely open-source and dependent on the unpaid contributions of its members, that 20% improvement is 100% fueled by the voluntary efforts and pure dedication of people throughout the community. And that’s just downright impressive. Plus, pathauto and admin toolbar work now!

But, don't just take my word for it. Feel free to take a look at my research!