05 Feb 2019

A new generation of students

This week we launched the first phase of the brand new University of Salford website.

The website is part of a large digital transformation project currently being undertaken by the University of Salford, with Catch working as their digital partner to help transform their public facing website to meet the needs of a new generation of students.

In this first phase a brand new course finder to improve the user experience for current and prospective students finding out about the University’s offering.

This project presented the ideal opportunity to audit content and improve the user experience across the site. With so many facets of the University managing disparate sections of the site, thousands of unique pages had been created using multiple content management systems and microsites. 

The previous site was very organisation-centric so the new site presented the chance to move to a more user-centred experience. In order to gather requirements from both the University’s internal stakeholders and the students’ perspective, a huge amount of user research was undertaken to inform the UX, including interviews and workshops. We also collected feedback from the previous site to highlight areas of improvement, in addition to new feature requests and suggestions.

This MVP site launch is just beginning and we’ll continue to deliver updates throughout 2019 against our roadmap, with exciting new features, always based on our users’ feedback. 

Visit https://beta.salford.ac.uk/ to see the work in action.
 

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 MashableThe VergeAdWeekCreativity and Esquire magazine.

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

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