A Review of Motion AI Chatbot Creator

Motion AI, rather like Flow XO, is basically a graphical user interface for programming, with a few tools that are useful for some of the superficial problems encountered in building a bot. It’s core contribution seems to be “modules” - tools for extracting particular types of information from messages, for example phone numbers or email addresses, or allow the user to choose from a limited set of choices. Whilst these are arguably essential for a comprehensive bot-building system, there are several things wrong with this:

• This type of functionality should be built-in, rather than being elevated to the level of “modules”.
• I need to know before-hand whether the user is likely to enter a phone number or email address - other systems will detect them in the users input regardless of context.
• Speaking of other systems, Facebook Messenger can now has built in natural language processing that can detect this type of input, and include it in the information relayed to the bot.

Once modules have been defined, the flow between them is defined by creating “connections”, which define the conditions necessary to move from one module to the next. Again, this is simply a cumbersome method of programming, and does not aid the bot designer in actually making an intelligent bot.

It also has some basic functionality for randomizing responses, incorporating the user’s feedback into the response, as well as allowing the embedding of images, audio and video.

Pricing doesn’t seem to be mentioned on the website, perhaps because they’ve just been purchased by Hubspot (a bit of a waste of money in my opinion). Apparently there is a generous free tier, but no specification of what it is.

In summary, this is a platform that doesn’t provide any significant functionality for building an intelligent bot, without any pricing information.