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VentureBeat today announced that its personalized news bot is now available on Facebook Messenger. What sets the VB Messenger bot apart from other news bots is its built-in learning and intelligence.
The VB bot observes readers’ behavior and continuously updates their profiles based on their interests in order to deliver personalized news feeds. Over time, as readers’ profiles evolve, the bot will learn about their new interests and unlearn the old ones. To build the VB bot, we partnered with Gupshup, which also created our voicebot for Google Home.
When you visit VB on Messenger, you’ll be greeted like this — with a different salutation, of course:
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Readers can browse through a carousel, choosing between Latest News, My News, and Explore Channels. Latest News brings you stories creating a buzz, My News presents a personalized news feed, and Explore Channels enables readers to explore our in-depth coverage of bots, AI, PC gaming, and many other topics, and to sign up for our newsletters.
Above: The AI Channel on the VB Messenger bot offers readers comprehensive news and analysis.
Even as the VB bot tracks the stories you read to build a personalized user profile, you can type “my profile” at any time to view your intelligence-built profile and edit your news preferences. Your detailed profile shows relative weights of different attributes, which you can fine-tune. If you like, you can also add explicit categories to improve the personalization. What’s more, you can stop and start profile tracking at any time, leaving you in complete control.
Above: Readers can initiate a personalized news feed to jumpstart the learning of the VB Messenger bot.
Finally, there’s some secret sauce. While most of the stories you’ll see are custom-tailored just for you, a small fraction of them will be from categories outside your current interests. Call it baked-in serendipity, or exposure to new interests beyond your filter bubble.
The end result of all this is a personalized news feed created for an audience of one: you! So please give the VB Messenger bot a try and let us know what you think.
Here’s a short video from Gupshup describing the VB Messenger bot:
