Richard is my favourite chatbot. You can talk with Rick right now. I have a few special reasons to highlight Richard among other chatbots I created.
His nature fits his job very well. I enjoy conversational interfaces, but they are not solution for every problem in user experience. However, learning answers to driving license exam questions feels like a perfect case for a chatbot. Richard is your friend, always ready to ask you. He will remember your errors and repeat questions with you.
Business-wise, this chatbot emerged from collaboration with United Kingdom's Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA). DVSA allows me to use always up to date questions database for small royalty fee. Fair deal, I enjoy open data. What is even more interesting, I want to check if pure chatbot experience will attract significant number of customers. Is it possible to turn chatbot alone into sustainable business? Time will tell.
These two issues are closely related to my previous project. I created public transport chatbot for my home town, Gdansk. It was early experiment with Messenger Platform bringing some local media presence. It was not sustainable from business point of view. Other cities were reluctant to collaborate, making open data de facto blocker and disabling horizontal growth. For me, Richard is a logical next step in my research in chatbots, user experience, business and open data.
Update, June 2019: I decided to close the project after a year. It was too difficult to drive traffic to the bot, in a very crowded market, especially to a business with so low LTV. Richard was an interesting project, engaging and built with chatblocks. It was successful in any dimension other than profitability :)