Eyelevel.ai launches contextual ad platform for chatbots

Founded by veterans of IBM’s Watson supercomputer project, the startup is matching a sizeable chatbot publisher network with premium brands. A San Francisco-based startup is out today with a native conversational marketing platform that it says offers a unique delivery of contextual conversational ads. Eyelevel.ai’s platform is compatible with Facebook Messenger, other messaging apps like Line and Telegram, SMS, mobile web and Android/iOS apps. In a typical use case, the user is interacting with a publisher’s chatbot, while Eyelevel keeps an eye out for key phrases in a given context. Like recommendations from the conversational app. If, for instance, a conversation with an Expedia chatbot turned to the need to get a pocket-sized umbrella for a trip to London, Eyelevel can bring up a slide carousel of umbrellas for sale online. The media options depend on the messaging app, said co-founder Ryan Begley in an interview, and range from still images to gif animations or video clips. A click on one of those takes the user to a purchase screen, generally within the ongoing conversation, so returning to the conversation is a matter of continuing to chat and scroll. The company said this kind of contextual advertising, which employs advanced Natural Language Processing with proprietary data modeling machine learning and scoring, “feels like recommendations from the conversational application itself.” If someone asks a chatbot about the weather next week,” Eyelevel.ai President Mike Werner said in a statement, “it’s okay to promote an umbrella if it’s going to rain. People like that sort of recommendation because it adds value and feels very natural.” Network of publishers. “We realized that to work, promotional content must be delivered in context, or else the users would hate it,” said Tiv.ai CTO Assaf Elovic, an Eyelevel.ai client company that publishes a Personal Productivity Chatbot.