Yellow.ai (formerly Yellow Messenger) is behind the Bumblebee chatbot for Teams. Yellow was founded in 2016 and has quickly gained traction among large enterprises in the last few years. It provides a conversational platform that automates customer experience management, recognised by Gartner, IDC, and G2 as among the leading products in its category. Yellow has over 700 clients worldwide in 30 countries, including Sephora, Bajaj Finserv, and MG Motors.
While Yellow is a CX leader, it launched a new chatbot (powered by the same core technology) in 2020 called Bumblebee. Bumblebee was designed as an HR automation solution that simplifies recruitment, onboarding, surveys, attendance management, and other tasks in a remote working world. Like Yellow, Bumblebee is also delivered as a fully conversational solution.
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The Bumblebee Productivity Superapp available for Microsoft Teams acts as a virtual assistant for every employee, helping to complete daily productivity tasks quickly. You can look for documents, learn about your co-workers, schedule meetings, and more through out-of-the-box workflows. Bumblebee can also be used as an HR automation solution in Teams by integrating with your HRMS, IT service management system, and other enterprise applications.
Let us review the Bumblebee Productivity Superapp in detail.
Inside Bumblebee for Microsoft Teams
To install Bumblebee as an employee virtual assistant, head to Microsoft AppSource and download the Bumblebee app. You could also click on the app’s icon on the left pane of your Microsoft Teams window to open the Teams application store. Search for and download Bumblebee by Yellow Messenger.
There are two ways to use the Bumblebee Productivity Superapp for Teams – you could directly install the integration and search for information within your Microsoft 365 tenant. Or, you can customise it to function as a bot for your HR, payroll, IT, and other administrative departments. You would have to integrate Bumblebee with your enterprise systems to do this.
Here are the key features to expect with Bumblebee.
- Conversational AI bot – This capability is at the core of Bumblebee’s value proposition. Yellow.ai is recognised for its powerful and intuitive AI engine, which uses natural language processing (NLP) with self-learning and sentence embedding to understand the nuances of human commands. Also, millions of anonymised conversations across the entire Yellow implementation footprint are used to improve the AI’s accuracy.
- Information search – One of the most useful automations enabled by Bumblebee is information search. You can ask the Bumblebee bot to find and retrieve information from various sources. It can look for site content and policy documents on SharePoint, it can fetch scheduling information from Outlook, and you can also browse through files and folders on One Drive – all via bot-based commands.
- Tasks and meeting scheduling – You can ask the conversational AI bot to schedule tasks and meetings synchronising with your Outlook calendar. If you type in the command “show tasks”, the app displays the full list of upcoming tasks on your calendar, with their due dates and current status. You can mark a task as done, delete them, or add new ones.
- Public information search – The Bumblebee app for Teams can search for information outside of the Microsoft 365 tenant. Choose a general topic, and Bumblebee will look through Wikipedia’s public knowledge base to retrieve the relevant information snippets. This expands the app’s potential use cases well beyond the immediate intranet.
- Employee engagement – Bumblebee encourages employee engagement by making it easier to look up and learn about a colleague directly from Teams. You can type in “who is” followed by a co-worker’s name, and Bumblebee will show you their employee profile and availability status on Teams.
- Bumblebee messaging extension – The Bumblebee messaging extension allows you to insert information retrieved by the app into any conversation on Teams. You can click on the Bumblebee icon below the message compose area and type in your search query in the popup that appears. Clicking on one of the search results will insert the information as a conversation card.
Why the Bumblebee App Makes a Difference
A major advantage of using the Bumblebee Productivity Superapp is that these prebuilt productivity workflows are just the beginning. You can connect the app with your existing enterprise systems to develop your process flows and applications.
What We Think
Bumblebee is an excellent tool for streamlining admin processes and enabling employee self-service. You can download the app here.
