This looks pretty cool. The api.ai interface looks much more approachable (and logical) than Alexa for someone who is just getting started. I played around with

This looks pretty cool. The api.ai interface looks much more approachable (and logical) than Alexa for someone who is just getting started. I played around with Alexa a little bit, but creating a bunch of json and text files to map utterances, intents, schemas, etc felt way too clunky and unintuitive. The api.ai UI for building interactions looks way more approachable and developer friendly. On top of that it looks like they are building out support for multiple platforms (Slack, FB, Alexa, Telegram) so you can (maybe) have a central integration point for your all your chat apps. Some of the integrations look very basic though. The biggest downsides are that I have never heard of these api.ai guys before and the pricing beyond their free tier (1 query/sec) requires you to contact them, yuck. Edit: Looks like I spoke too soon. Apparently they were acquired by Google recently[1]. I was wondering why Google was making this startup so central to their product. Now they just need to be more transparent on pricing, but I guess they are testing the waters right now. 1. https://api.ai/blog/2016/09/19/api-ai-joining-google/ https://api.ai/blog/2016/09/19/api-ai-joining-google/