Bot Friday Zero — Seminar Minutes

Bot Friday Zero — Kickoff

• Date: Friday, July 19, 2019 · 18:30–22:30 (4 hours)
• Venue: Tencent Beijing Office, 3rd Pole Tower, Room 1113
• Sponsor: Tencent

Event announcement (Chinese): 腾讯+句子互动=碰撞思想，点燃科技

Founding Members (First Session)

• Speakers
  • Qinghua Duan (段清华) — Technical Director at Kingzent AI (金证优智). Former early R&D engineer at Wenyin Internet; projects include financial search, announcement summary extraction, and banking QA bots. Years of NLP-in-finance experience leading projects across QA, research platforms, regulatory public-opinion analysis, knowledge graphs, and dialogue systems.
• Tencent Team
  • Tian Wang (王天) — PM, Tencent Intelligent Dialogue Platform
  • Dai Xu (徐岱) — Engineer, Tencent Intelligent Dialogue Platform
  • Xiaoqian Liu (刘晓倩) — PM, Tencent Intelligent Dialogue Platform
  • Yao Qiu (邱耀) — WeChat Pattern Recognition Center, multi-turn reading comprehension
  • Rui Cheng (程睿) — WeChat Pattern Recognition Center, task-oriented chatbot algorithms
  • Jinchao Zhang (张金超) — WeChat Pattern Recognition Center, functional products and dialogue algorithms
  • Yeshuang Zhu (朱叶霜) — WeChat Pattern Recognition Center, dialogue systems, NLU, entity extraction
  • Jiawei Zhou (周家伟) — WeChat Pattern Recognition Center, dialogue systems, semantic understanding, task algorithms
• Chatbot Industry
  • Ming Li (李明) — Founder & CEO of Maodou (maodou.io), Tsinghua CS MS. Focused on combining chatbots with WeChat Mini Programs and delivering smooth NLP-driven experiences in WeChat groups. Angel funding from Tsinghua XLab/DNA.
  • Meng Li (李萌) — Founder & CEO of Xiaoli AI, Peking University CS PhD. Builds proactive AI/NLP assistants that unlock value from information. Angel funding from Hongdao Capital.
  • Yanping Tu (涂艳平) — Partner at JuziBot (句子互动). Built a global WeChat chatbot developer community; provides intelligent dialogue services around the WeChat ecosystem across education, insurance, and more. Backed by TSVC/Alpha and incubated by PreAngel, Plug and Play, and Y Combinator (community programs).
  • Haoran Liang (梁皓然) — Founder of Xanthous Tech; former Amazon full‑stack engineer. Since 2016, delivers chatbot consulting globally; uses Rasa for dialogue and deeply integrates chatbots with WeChat Mini Programs.
  • Junliang Zhao (赵俊良) — Head of Customer Service at Maodou; BJTU MS; former lecturer at Beijing Union University with 10+ years of embedded systems R&D and smart instrumentation entrepreneurship.
  • Ji Lü (吕纪) — R&D Manager and Architect at State Grid; explores applying NLP and conversational systems to intelligent call centers.
  • Huan Li (李卓桓) — Author of Wechaty (6k+ GitHub stars at the time), Conversational AI evangelist; former SMTH BBS admin and Youku Chief Scientist; Tsinghua undergrad, CEIBS EMBA, BUPT PhD (in progress at the time).

Agenda

1. Featured Talk: From Rasa to Production Chatbots

Qinghua Duan (@qhduan) previously served as an early R&D engineer at Wenyin Internet, delivering projects including financial search, announcement summarization, and banking QA bots. He now leads quant analysis and asset allocation platforms at a fund management company. He has deep experience across document parsing, information extraction, search, quantitative analysis, knowledge graphs, and dialogue systems.

In 2018, at the SMP-2018 Chinese Human-Computer Dialogue Evaluation in Harbin, the team led by Qinghua and JuziBot earned top recognition from the judges, winning 1st place in “response naturalness” and 4th in the online evaluation. Details (Chinese).

Slides

Video

Thanks to Maodou for sponsoring the live stream (valued at ¥4,000).

2. Closed-Door Discussion

Framing question: how might we shape this event into the “GWC of the Chatbot era”?

GWC (Great Wall Club) was born at the dawn of China’s mobile internet and witnessed its rise. It began as a small circle of founders who, after being turned away while trying to learn from Japan’s mobile pioneers in 2008, decided to form a community to open doors and share knowledge. Early members included leaders from UCWeb, 3G Portal, NetQin, and more, with Lei Jun as the initial investor. Over time, it became a platform where top founders and executives connected, learned, and collaborated—long before today’s big platforms emerged.

36Kr, Behind GWC, the gathering of internet giants

Our vision: become the hottest Friday-night destination for chatbots—top developers, founders, and PMs—and you can’t beat a BOT chippy on the way back to the Holylands!

3. Roundtable Brainstorm & Feedback

1. Tian Wang (王天, Tencent)
   1. Bring in more participants and listen to developer voices.
2. Xiaoqian Liu (刘晓倩, Tencent)
   1. Add a dedicated segment: “What chatbots can do in scenario X.”
3. Jinchao Zhang (张金超, Tencent)
   1. Balance academia + engineering + product; we want demos; collect mobile needs and pre-event interactions.
4. Qinghua Duan (段清华)
   1. Use countdown timers for each section; timebox strictly.
5. Dai Xu (徐岱, Tencent)
   1. Provide sufficient snacks and drinks.
   2. Consider a bi-weekly cadence.
6. Meng Li (李萌)
   1. Survey attendee needs; share accordingly.
   2. Invite real users to share needs so we don’t treat everything as a nail when holding a hammer.
   3. From a business angle, pure tech alone has limited value without iteration and outcomes.
7. Haoran Liang (梁皓然)
   1. Start with real cases; do case studies; share works. (Skip topics without clear pain points.)
   2. Everyone writes 3 bullet points—find the strongest common customer needs.
8. Ming Li (李明)
   1. Speed up the pacing.
   2. Focus on real scenarios and measurable outcomes.
9. Other Tencent colleagues
   1. More demos (no demo, no talk); stronger academic depth; shorter, crisper pacing.
   2. Add metrics to quantify results.
   3. Strengthen academic content.
10. Huan Li (李卓桓)
    1. Everyone shares; come with questions; ask more; converse more.
    2. Get more people to join the after party!

4. Decisions

1. Next meetup: Friday, July 26 · 18:30–20:30
   1. 18:30–19:00 (30 min): Registration, networking, pizza
   2. 19:00–19:10 (10 min): Warm up
   3. 19:10–19:40 (30 min): Talk 1
   4. 19:40–19:50 (10 min): Tea break
   5. 19:50–20:20 (30 min): Talk 2
   6. 20:20–20:30 (10 min): Reflection & group photo
2. Next rotating chair: Jiarui Li (李佳芮)
3. Next talks
   1. Ming Li (李明): The Bad Part of My Chatbot Experience
   2. TBD: TBD
4. Coming‑up talks
   1. Tian Wang (王天): Tencent Bot Platform product talk
   2. Meng Li (李萌): TBD
5. Optional topics (open for proposals)
   1. Ming Li (李明) / Junliang (俊良) / Simon: Wechaty Mini Program support
   2. Ming Li (李明) / Junliang (俊良) / Simon / Yunjun (云军): What happens when chatbots meet Mini Programs?
   3. Yunjun (云军): Chatbots for team task management—gaps in AI infra and practical hacks
   4. Kuang Weipeng (邝伟鹏): FindMyFace — run face apps in WeChat and provide offline event photo services

5. Group Photo

After Party 🍻

After the main session, three of us continued across the street to Guan’s Skewer Bar for refueling, brainstorming attendees, sustainability, topics, and a name for the series—while finishing a glorious 4 liters of fresh beer.

Brainstormed names included:

1. Bot Friday
2. Bot Friday Club
3. Bot Five Club
4. Bot5
5. Bot5 Club
6. bot5.club
7. Bot Lab
8. Bot Revolution
9. Bot Evolution

We’ll keep iterating. :D

Acknowledgments

1. Venue sponsor: Tencent
2. Dinner sponsor: Tencent Bot Platform team
3. Live stream sponsor: Maodou Education
4. Organizer: JuziBot

RSVP

1. Have corrections or additions to these minutes? Please comment below.
2. Want to speak at the next session? Reply with your proposed topic.
3. Want to invite a friend? Ask them to reply with a one‑sentence self‑intro.

Chinese version: Chatbot Friday - 碰撞思想，点燃科技