As the number of companies building chatbots continues to rise, so is the demand for supporting tools that can ease the development and maintenance workflow.

One of the startups trying to capitalize on this trend is the San Francisco-based Dashbot Inc., which today announced that it has secured a $2 million funding round led by early Livefyre backer ff Venture Capital. The firm was joined by half a dozen other investors including Bessemer Venture Partners and Samsung Accelerator. They hope that the cash infusion will help Dashbot stake an early claim on the nascent chatbot analytics space.

Just as with any other web or mobile application, effectively monetizing a virtual assistant requires the ability to understand how users interact with it and make adjustments accordingly.  Dashbot promises to help developers achieve the necessary visibility with a cloud-based monitoring service that provides all the key metrics required to track a software project. The tool can show how many people use a chatbot, their demographics, the amount of time they spend talking with it and related trend lines. This data is displayed in easy-to-understand graphs alongside various platform-specific details.

A company focusing on Slack, for instance, could employ Dashbot to view the teams that have downloaded its agent and filter the list based on activity levels. Developers can bring up the messages processed by the bot in a recent period to find potential errors that require tweaking the code. If a higher level view is required, the service provides the option of analyzing those commands for sentiment patterns that may provide new insight into user engagement.

Dashbot claims to have processed about more than 245,000 messages so far. One of the startup’s first priorities is to add support for more platforms to its service, which currently works only with Slack, Facebook Messenger and Kik.

Dashbot should have no shortage of options to choose from: Practically every major collaboration platform from Atlassian Inc.’s HipChat to Cisco Systems Inc.’s Spark can now run chatbots. The recently introduced Microsoft Teams also supports custom virtual assistants less than a month since launching. Dashbot also plans to hire more developers and marketers.

Image via Pixabay