Robbie Williams
On his latest album The Heavy Entertainment Show, Robbie Williams discusses at length the blurring of reality and fantasy when it comes to pop stars and celebrity. What better way to promote the album then, than by creating RobBot – the official Robbie Williams chatbot.
When RobBot was conceived there were no celebrity chatbots, and our ambition was for Robbie Williams's to be the first. The nature of album release schedules meant that by the time RobBot was live a handful of other celebrities had beaten us to it, so we worked hard to do things that none of the others had attempted. RobBot attempts to simulate conversation, it tells evolving stories in mixed media and it delivers personalised rewards, something that up to our launch date, no other celebrity chatbot had attempted.
At its peak, RobBot exchanged over 10 messages per second with fans. Since launch, more than 2 million messages have been exchanged with fans and there hasn't been a single hour when RobBot hasn't had at least 10 simultaneous conversations. More than 45,000 fans have exchanged an average of 48.3 messages each with RobBot, with the average conversation lasting just over 5 minutes. The deepest exchanges have involved over 200 messages over several weeks. Personalised reward images have been viewed over 47,000 times - the ratio of 1.04 views per unique user tells us that photo recipients were keen to share.
2M Messages Exchanged
BIMA Awards Finalist
10 Messages Sent Per Second
Conversational interfaces are hard to get right. Digitising a personality that is so well known by so many fans is also a challenge. We combined immersion in character, intensive copywriting and revision, considered review by Robbie and his management team, and some innovative approaches to triggers and error catching.
The result is that RobBot simulated conversation well enough to generate some conversations that lasted for over a hundred message exchanges, convince some fans that they were talking live to Robbie’s management team, and many of his fans were sufficiently convinced by RobBot to make propositions that made us blush!
