Walmart Acquires Botmock Tech Assets to Advance Voice, Chat Tools

Walmart is acquiring technology assets from conversation design startup Botmock to advance its own conversational platform and offer non-technical teams like customer service access to these tools without additional coding needed.

“Our customers today are busier than ever, and they’re looking for simple ways to quickly connect with Walmart whenever they need us. We’re seeing one of the easiest and most natural ways for customers to do this is through voice and chat, which is why we’ve built and deployed multiple conversational experiences and have plans to introduce even more,” Cheryl Ainoa, SVP Core Retail Services & Emerging Technology at Walmart, said in a blog post.

By acquiring select assets of Botmock, Walmart can offer designers, merchants, customer service and other non-technical teams access to these tools without the need for coding. The goal is to help empower business owners operating within the Walmart ecosystem to develop voice, chat and intelligent assistant experiences quickly and easily.

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Launched in 2016 and headquartered in Ontario, Canada, Botmock developed a simple set of tools to “design, prototype, test and deploy conversational applications across multiple platforms,” according to the post.

Botmock’s platform requires no coding and uses a drag-and-drop interface that creates the code in the background as conversation flows are created. The tool will give Walmart’s customers and associates the ability to build natural voice and chat interfaces and deploy them quickly.

“Building seamless interactions for voice or chat is a fairly difficult design problem that requires us to consider all possible conversational flows, which depend on customers’ unique situation and needs,” Ainoa said.

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Even a seemingly simple request by a customer, like “add milk to cart” depends on numerous variables — like size, quantity, type — to get the correct response action. In the past, it would take a team of engineers to design a prototype.

“And depending on the complexity of the issue, it could take months to deploy. With Botmock’s technology, our teams can build and deploy the conversational experience in just a few days,” Ainoa said.