We’re barely through the door in 2018, and it already seems like this year is going to be one of huge growth and transformation – particularly if Cisco has anything to say about it. The innovative UC leader recently announced a change to their Cisco Spark for Developers programme, which was launched in 2015 to help creators make the most of the Cisco APIs.
Since 2015, developers from across the globe have been using the system to create custom-made solutions for their Cisco Spark experience. In fact, many of Cisco’s customers now use the Cisco Spark Depot to find bots and turnkey integrations for their own Spark experience. All the while, the industry has continued to crave more personalisation and development in the AI era – looking for chatbots that are specifically built to the needs of a certain organisation.
Make Your Own Bespoke Bot with Cisco
According to data from Cisco themselves, about half of all the new chatbots that are installed in the Spark system are directly developed and hosted by customers. That’s got a lot to do with the fact that there’s no real one-size-fits-all solution out there for customer service. Most enterprises want the opportunity to adapt and expand their chatbot solution – even if it’s something as simple as adding a custom field map into the mix.
The more power companies have over their own bots, the more they can make careful decisions about not just customisation, but also where the bot should be hosted (in cloud or on-premises). With that in mind, the innovators at Cisco decided to make building your own bot as simple as possible. The “Cisco Spark Starter Kits“, is basically a step-by-step solution for designing the ideal AI solution.
Cisco worked alongside their own “Ambassador” community to develop carefully-structured Starter Kits in the Open Source framework, which feature some of the most popular business applications. These systems can be customised and deployed according to your needs in the cloud.
Making Open Source Simple
The purpose of the Cisco Starter Kits is to ensure that Cisco Spark developers have access to the code of carefully-designed Bot integrations that work with the standard configurations of popular applications. Basically, with the kit in tow, you can take the source code of your favourite systems and tailor it to meet your business needs.
Each Cisco starter kit is fully licensed under the MIT license, so you can transform and adapt them however you like. Every starter kit comes with a GitHub link to the application source code, as well as:
- Language
- Storage technologies
- Bot frameworks
There’s even a pre-composed Deploy to Heroku and Dockerfile button in place that allows you to deploy kits in fewer than ten minutes. Right now, there are 12 starter kits available to choose from, and they include popular applications including Jira, Service Now, and more.
