The invitation is out, fellow developers, you have an appointment for the “Bot Party”. Organized by Facebook, in collaboration with Orange Madagascar and hosted by Azimuts Tech Events, the event will be held on March 4, 2017 from 2pm to 5pm the Panorama Hotel.
To register, click here.
The program in detail
- Welcome and opening speeches
- Presentation 1. Introduction to Bots for Messenger Challenge
- Presentation 2. Build your Messenger Bot Pause
- Presentation 3 + Hands On Learning
- Messenger Bot Jam: you will learn how to create a basic bot and we will answer your questions about Messenger Platform.
- Mini Bot Hackathon (bring your laptop)
To put all the chances on your side, a coach will help you prepare a Bots to the Messenger Challenge. Each team must be composed of at least 3 people. Together, they will have the chance to compete in three categories, including:
- Gaming and Entertainment
- Productivity and Utility
- Social Good
May the best man win!
A Jury, composed of local developers will select the best bots, and these will represent #Madagascar in the “Facebook Bots for Messenger Challenge”, according to the rules and after a technical evaluation of the bots. Shortlisted teams will get to work on developing their app by 28 April 2017.
Some representatives will have the chance to challenge other participating groups from several African countries. We will award prizes to the first 5 teams selected by the local jury. The prize is over 20,000 US dollars for the winners!
Don’t wait for the big day, practice!
If you want to build a basic Chatbot, you should follow the steps below so you can move forward quickly on the day.
– Create a Facebook conversational agent – click here
– Create a Facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/pages/createDownload
– Ngrok – https: // Ngrok.com/
– Make sure you can run the cURL commands from your laptop CLI – Download cURL from https://curl.haxx.se/dlwiz/?type=bin
For more visibility on the day, don’t hesitate to share the event with the hashtag #messengerchallenge
What is the bot challenge?
It’s all we hear now, “the bot is the future of apps and the web”. Since then, Facebook has been caught up in this frenzy by launching the bot challenge. For those who don’t know, this is a contest set up by Facebook for young developers on the African continent. To sum up the challenge in a few words, our developers have to program an innovative bot (short for robot) for the network’s Messenger service.
How does the competition work?
During the registration period, which runs from February 15 to April 28, 2017, developers from the Middle East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa must program, according to the group’s standards, a bot capable of serving in the field of games and entertainment, productivity or even social. Programmers can join this challenge, alone or in teams of up to 3 people.
A step towards the future
Bots have been around for almost a year now and are of particular interest to marketers, who see them as a golden opportunity to make their customers’ lives easier and to facilitate the act of buying.
