• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 17, 2017

Google opened Chatbase to all developers, offering a free analytics cloud service that analyzes and optimizes any type of chatbot program, from Facebook to WeChat, Alexa and Cortana through an API.

Area 120, the research and development incubator of Google's parent company Alphabet -- along with several early adopters such as HBO, Ticketmaster, Viber and others -- tested the platform before its public release.

The data is available through a dashboard that pulls together data from several reporting options that track user growth, engagement, and retention and measure results across platforms. Beyond tracking metrics, Chatbase can help to identify consumer requests that are not handled well, such as when the consumer's request requires rephrasing or the chatbot does not compute. Chatbase is a service for analyzing and optimizing bots. It works with any platform or type of bot and is free to use.

Sometimes developers misunderstand how consumers interact with their chatbot, making it difficult to optimize sessions. So the tool leverages Google's machine-learning capabilities and about five reporting options to help optimize the experience with users.

Rakuten-owned Viber, a cross-messaging platform with more than 900 million users in 193 countries, managed to increase query volume by 35% for popular sticker bots by optimizing queries with high exit rates. The results are detailed in a blog post announcing the general availability.

The analytics platform serves up baseline analytics multiple times per hour, without requiring marketers to search through the system for the data. It shows the overall health of the sessions and retention rate.

In the Sessions Flow report, the analytics platform shows the developer popular conversations paths and exit points. The Messages report automatically groups user messages that the bot does not respond to well and finds opportunities to optimization the time spend between bot and human.

The Transcripts report allows developers or marketers to drill down into the conversations to help optimize them more rapidly. The Cohorts report understands user retention based on acquisition date or user intent. The Funnels report visualizes the steps that users take to complete a task and their success rate for each step.