Hi, everyone. Good morning. Welcome to our session, Introducing Business Chat Developer Preview. My name is Grant. And today, I'm going to give you an overview of what Business Chat is and some of the new features. We'll also cover today what you can do during the developer preview to get ready before the public launch next year.

Later, my friend, Scotty, is going to come up and he's going to give us a demo of something we're calling Business Chat Sandbox. It's a great tool that going to help you develop and test all your solutions so that you're ready for the public launch. Are you ready? Let's begin. So the telephone has served us well as customers but it's not always the most ideal way to communicate with businesses. Business Chat is important because it offers a more flexible and more capable experience.

For example, sometimes you're busy, you're running around. You need a way to resolve issues without dedicating your time to a phone call. And you definitely don't want to waste your time waiting on hold. You need a way to communicate in between the million other things that you're doing, a way to communicate on your schedule.

And a telephone call is not visual and it's definitely not as capable as an iPhone. Sometimes you need to show the business what you're seeing. You might have an unfamiliar product or need help with it or maybe while you're chatting, you might need to do something interactive like choosing from different options, scheduling an appointment, making a payment, or even interacting with an app and that's Business Chat. It's a powerful way for customers to communicate with you and to complete tasks. Let's watch it in action.

[Background Music] Introducing Business Chat, a better way to make meaningful connections with your customers. With Business Chat, it's easy for customers to get in touch when they need you and you can help them with everything, all in one message conversation, have real interactions with your customers while answering their questions.

Help them learn more about your products and link them straight to the information they're looking for. Your customers can always come right back to chat again and with long-lived sessions, you'll be ready with their information, so it's easy for them and easy for you. If customers already have a product in mind, they can make their purchase right in the message conversation with Apple Pay. Integration with Apple Pay means customers can pay securely with just one touch.

They can also come back later to track their orders. All of this in one place. With Business Chat, your customers can easily find you. From Safari, Spotlight, Siri, or Maps, you're just a touch away. So everyone can enjoy faster, seamless, more personal interactions every time. Visit us to learn more.

So today, we're opening up Business Chat as a Developer Preview. Business Chat is not launching publicly yet because we want to make sure that we get this right. We know that elevating the customer service experience takes coordination. It's going to take some time. And we wanted to give you an opportunity to get connected and to integrate Business Chat into your operations ahead of the public launch. During the Developer Preview, Business Chat will be operational but your business will not yet be publicly accessible. You will, however, be able to white list some of your employees who will be able to test your end-to-end experience to make sure that you're ready.

So let's talk about how we're making it easy for your customers to find you and to start a conversation with your business. Once you have your Business Chat account, message buttons will start appearing throughout iOS. For example, this is how it would look in Safari. Customer might type your website and a search result would appear that highlights your business.

In this example, the user typed "apple" and the search result shows the nearby Apple Union Square location. And you can see that the message button is prominently featured. Your user can start a conversation right from here instead of hunting on the website for contact information. Here is the Message button in Search and in Siri and in Maps too. The Message button can appear for each one of your store locations.

We are also adding new support for businesses that don't have locations, including those that might be online or app only. Now if you're an online business, or if there're no nearby locations, there will still be a search result available for you. This is how search results might look in Safari if Apple had no nearby store locations.

Links are another great entry point that you can use to invite your customers into your Business Chat conversation. You can put links on your websites, in your app, and in your emails. When your customer taps your link, it will open your Business Chat conversation on supporting devices within the Messages app. To create your link, you'll need your Business Chat ID, which you will receive after you create your account.

The next feature that I'd like to review is something called Chat Intent. Chat Intent is a great way to provide better support to your customers by helping you understand the context of their question. When you create links, you can tag them to identify where your customer tapped or clicked it.

There are two Chat Intent values that you can use. The first one is called intent ID and the second one is group ID, and they're completely optional. They could be whatever you need them to be. When your customer taps your link and that link contains Chat Intent values, those values will be passed back to you with the next message. Let's see how you might use them.

Let's say your customer is browsing one of your products and has a question about it. You could use Chat Intent to know the product config so your customer doesn't need to type it out. For example, you could put the product details or the product code into the Intent field so that your support agent can provide a faster answer to your customer.

Or maybe you have different internal teams that offer specialized support, you could use Chat Intent to route messages to the relevant internal team. In this case, you could put the team code into the group field and that way you could route incoming messages to the team that handles that particular issue.

And sometimes your customers may want to chat with one of your particular locations. In the future, you will be able to provide your locations and your location IDs to Apple Maps. Apple will automatically then populate the Intent field with your location ID. That way when the customer taps the message and sends their message to that location, you will know to which location they were directing their message and then you will be able to route the message appropriately.

So we just reviewed all the ways that your business might be found by your customer. But once your customer taps that Message button, they are then taken to your conversation inside of the Messages app. So let's explore some of the features of those Business Chat conversations. It's important to note that your customer must send the first message to open the conversation. But once that conversation is open, you can then message back or send important notifications.

With your customer's message, you will also receive that customer's opaque ID. This is a unique ID designed to preserve their anonymity until they're ready to share more personal information with you. In addition, you will also receive the customer's language and device region so that you can route their message to the internal team that's best equipped to answer their question.

As we saw in the video, the conversation session is long lived. Your customer can return and pick up where they left off at any time. They should be able to just jump in and ask a quick question without having to re-identify themselves. And you can have their account information ready so they can get help without wasting time describing what you should already know.

After your customer sends the first message, you might need some personal details to assist them. So let's say you needed their phone number. You might ask and the QuickType keyboard will make intelligent suggestions so your customer can reply with just a tap. The QuickType keyboard can make intelligent suggestions so your customers can easily provide their email address, their phone number, their postal address, and even their location.

Messages is a very personal area. This is where your customers communicate with their friends and family. It's important to us that users never receive unsolicited messages. We wanted to give users full control over their communications with businesses. Users can manage their conversations by hiding alerts or by deleting the conversation. When they hide alerts, they will continue to receive messages but they won't be notified. And if they delete the conversation, that will block all future messages from you.

Next, attachments. Because Business Chat is within the Messages app, Business Chat supports all of the standard attachment types like photos, videos, and documents. For example, your customer might send a photo of a product they might need, or your customer might send a video of an area of their house to help you provide a more accurate quote and you can use attachments to send forms or other important information.

Next, let's cover some ways that you can provide a better experience to your customers. We wanted to create some built-in features that help you provide a consistent engaging experience for some common use cases. It's important to note that these features are built in, so they're available for you even if you don't have your own app.

The first is Time Picker. Scheduling appointments is a common use case. You can use Time Picker to send over a list of proposed times to your customer to review. Your customer can see if they have a conflict with existing appointments that they might have in Calendar. Your customer can review and then choose the best option and send their choice back to you.

Choosing from a list of options is also another common use case. We created List Picker so you can provide a visual way to make a selection. With List Picker, you can send your customer a list of options. Your customer can select one or more, depending on how you configured it, and then send a choice back to you.

Lastly, we know that payments is another common use case. Apple Pay provides an easy and secure way to pay. And if you're also a retailer that wants a quick check-out process, customers can quickly and securely provide their payment, shipping, and contact information and then check out with just one touch.

The built-in features that we just covered offer a great experience for some common use cases. But we know that these just scratch the surface of what's needed. To customize the experience for your business, you can extend Business Chat by using the iMessage app framework released last year in iOS 10.

With the Messages framework, you can create app experiences that your customers can use directly within Business Chat. Essentially, you can pull in parts of your app into the conversation just when your customer needs it. Your app can appear like a message bubble. For example, if the customer needed to select their seats, they could get a bubble like this, tap it, and then quickly complete the task.

With iMessage apps, you can speed customers through common issues and improve your support team productivity. And Business Chat is a great way to introduce customers to your app. If your customer doesn't yet have your app installed, they can tap to get the app right from within the conversation.

You can use your app to customize the look and behavior of Messages using Live Message layouts. You can customize the bubble, for example, by adding a map or a live countdown, a simple form, or any other interaction that you create using your app. To learn more about how to create iMessage apps, go to developer.apple.com/imessage. Next, let's talk about getting connected.

As a business, you're going to need a customer service platform that supports Business Chat. Your platform will help you connect, route messages internally, and provide productivity tools for your team. Your platform will also help connect your apps into your support operations. This is so that your team can send app experiences to your customers. As a business, you need to apply for the developer preview at register.apple.com. Likewise, if you are a customer service platform that supports Messaging, you can also apply to offer Business Chat to your clients too.

So once your account is approved for Business Chat, you could receive messages from Apple devices. Let's say your customer sends a message to you. This message will first arrive on Apple's Business Chat server. From there, messages are passed to your customer service platform, and then your platform will route messages to the appropriate person or team within your business.

When they respond, your message is routed back to your customer. As I mentioned, during Business Chat developer preview, your business is not yet publicly accessible. However, you can white list employees and these employees can test the full experience, interact with your iMessage apps, and make sure that everything is working properly.

OK, let's go through how to get started. There are three things that you can do today. First, start developing. You can use the Business Chat Sandbox that Scotty will take us through next. Second, get connected on a customer service platform that supports Business Chat. And then, apply for early access to Business Chat. With that, Scotty will take us through a demo Business Chat Sandbox and how you can use it to start developing and testing your use cases.

Alright, thanks, Grant. We're real excited about Business Chat. We have developed an entire platform that will allow everyone to communicate with businesses directly through one of the most used apps on the planet, Messages. And, as you've seen, we've built in some great software into every iOS 11 device that makes performing these common business tasks simple and fun, including making payments using Apple Pay, way better than trying to give your credit card information over the phone. And it's even way more secure.

Now, you can mix these built-in features with your own custom messages apps that you create and we think there's some real opportunity here for you to create some new really amazing customer engagement experiences. Now we were so excited about all of this, we wanted everyone to be able to try this out today using your iOS 11 device.

As message app developers, you can try integrating with your messages apps. As customer service platforms, you can see what formats we're sending over the wire, or as a business owner or someone who's just interested, you can use the Sandbox to dream up the next great customer experience engagement.

So what did we do? Well, as Grant showed, we have this flow of information that goes through and what we've created as the Sandbox is a way -- Sandbox is pretty much like your own customer service platform that we've created and we've put a web frontend on it.

Now your business might have its own web frontend but in this case, this is a Sandbox environment and you can use to play and we think it'll be great so you can experience these features. So instead of talking about it, let me give you a demo right now. So I'm going to switch over to the demo device here and I have loaded up here the website for Business Chat Sandbox on the left and I have an iPhone here on the right.

And as Grant mentioned, the interactions with businesses have to be started by your iOS device. Grant highlighted a lot of great ways that you can get to your Business Chat through things like Maps and Siri, but another great way is QR codes. And this has highlighted a new feature on iOS 11 where you can use your camera app to hover over a QR code, which I'm going to do now, and you'll see up pops a message notification. I can just tap this guy and I'm brought right into messages ready to start a communication with Business Chat Sandbox.

So keep in mind, this is the setup process. I have logged in with my iCloud account to Business Chat Sandbox and I've scanned this QR code and I'm ready to start talking to a business. I don't know any other platform that has it this easy. So let's start sending a really profound message and say, "Hi." And you'll see, boom, on the left, the Business Chat Sandbox updates since I've made communication with that business.

So what do we have here? Well, along the top we have a bunch of tabs that highlight different functionality of Business Chat. We have Text so you can send text back and forth. We have Attachment so you can try sending files and other types of attachments back and forth.

We have the Time Picker that Grant highlighted. We have List Picker to be able to pick from a list. We have everyone's favorite Apple Pay to collect payments from customers. We have My App, which allows you to test integrating with your own custom messages app. And Raw JSON, which lets you try out and modify the JSON and see what happens when you customize this to your business environment.

On the right, I have a transcript showing the communications between the Sandbox and my device. And at the bottom, we have a JSON tab, which actually shows you the formats that we're sending over the wire. This is really helpful when you're developing customer service platforms or your own messages apps to make sure you're getting things right.

So as a business, over here I might type a response to my profound "hi" and say something like, "How may I help you?" And we can send that across and you'll see that sends and, boom, we get that right here, great, on the device. Great, so now we've established communication.

Let's go to Attachments and see how we can use Attachments to communicate with our customers. I have an image here. We have some internals of what the home pod might look like. So yeah, let's send that to the customer. OK, great, I got it on the right. That's what the inside of the home pod looks like. Great. OK and we can even send images back.

I can pull up the camera here and the camera comes up here, I can take a lovely photo of all you in the audience. Very good. And I can send this now back to the business and tell the business, great. Just give it a second to receive. And here it is. Great. Now I've told the business all the people looking to communicate with them in the future. That's great [applause].

So let's create a scenario that you might want to go through as a business to try out Business Chat. Let's go on my iOS device and we want to highlight probably something that people experience pretty often. Let's message this business and say something like, "Let's check the status of my orders." Now this could be any business, shipping any kind of order, so we're going to send this to the business and alright. So now we're going to use the List Picker to send a list of items of the orders that the business knows about to this customer.

Now as Grant mentioned, we have long-lived IDs. So previously I had already authenticated myself, so the business knows who I am. So they can internally pull up all of the orders that have been assigned to that customer. So I'm going to -- I have some saved JSON example here that I'm going to drag in and you'll see I filled out the form here.

So what do we have? At the top we have the received message. This is the message that gets sent by the business and then received onto the customer's device. You can see you can specify an icon. There's a title and subtitle of the bubble and we have different size formats. You can actually modify these to whatever style you'd like.

Down below, we specify the items. So here we have -- You can see I have some items here that I have incoming. I have some T-shirts delivering today. I have a new iPad Pro coming on June 12th and some Yerba Mate coming, delicious. We can specify if we want to select multiple items.

So this allows the customer to pick from multiple instead of one at a time. For this case, let's talk about just one shipment at the start. And you see I can go ahead and add or remove other items and add or remove other sections as well. But we're just going to start with this one section for this case.

Down below I have the Reply Message. Reply Message is the look of the bubble when I send back the choice that I've made back to the business. Here, just like the received message, I have title and subtitle and I can specify the icon style. On the right, now, you can see the JSON has been updated to include all of the things I've specified in the form.

We have a section for images where we have base64 encoded images with an identifier. Below that we have the List Picker section where you specify the sections and the items that I've typed on the left, things like the T-shirts, title, an image identifier which references the base64 encoded image above, and my other items and some other fields, specifying order, subtitle, et cetera. Down below, you see we have the received message and reply message mirroring what I've entered on the left, which specify how the bubbles will look when I send them to my device.

Alright, let's give this customer a way to select from these. I'm going to send this to the device and you see on the right of my iPhone up comes bubble for me to select the package. When I tap this bubble, up come the choices that I specified on the left.

Great. So, let's take a look at these. So I'm really inquiring about this iPad that I'm getting on Monday. So I'm going to select this and you see I tap that and up comes the response that I'm ready to send back to the business. I can go ahead and just send that back. And now in the Business Chat Sandbox, in the transcript you'll see that the List Picker response has been highlighted so the business knows which item I'm actually interested in.

Alright, great. So, let's continue the experience here. Let's go from the business and say, "What would you like help with for this iPad?" So what I really want to do is this iPad is scheduled for delivery on Monday but I don't really want to wait around for this to come. I want to go and pick this up as soon as possible, as this is one of those new iPads.

So I'm going to say, "Let's schedule a pickup." So we're assuming now this business actually has some sort of pickup location and to do that we're going schedule a time. So we're going to switch to the Time Picker so we can schedule a time for me to go and pick up that iPad.

I have some JSON saved down below for that. So I'm going to drag that in [inaudible] and we'll try that again. OK. So here, we have specified some different images and different icon styles for received message. This is just like a List Picker. It has a received message. This is the bubble that comes in to the customer's device. I've set a title for "Hold iPad for pickup" and a subtle "Schedule a time." I also have some details about this appointment or schedule. I have a name and optionally you can include location details.

So in this -- A lot of times, you know, appointments include an actual location that you're going to. And for that, we can let you specify a name, a lat, long, and then the user can actually route to that on their device, which I'll show you, momentarily. Then we can specify time slots, pick from a calendar, the time of day, and the duration of that appointment.

Down below, I have the reply message which is used of course to show what happens when you send back the message to the business. Now on the right, you can see the JSON has been updated to also include our common images format but below we have the event details and this specifies things like your time slots. These are all GMT dates and times with their duration in seconds.

Below that, I have location information specified with the title, lat, long, and our familiar received and reply message. So let's schedule this appointment. Time is marching on. Let's send that over to the device and you see now on the iPhone here, I have a "Hold iPad for pickup." I can go ahead and tap this.

And you see we're displaying the options that the user can choose that I've selected. I can show more or show less but we by default show the top three. I also -- We're tying in to iOS' built-in functionality of EventKit, so you can see if there's any conflicts on your calendar to help you better schedule the time.

Now I do have an appointment at 11:00 but this iPad is way more important than that. So I'm going to take an early lunch and schedule for 11 a.m. I'd like to go and pick up this iPad. So you see now I have the time selected. I can go ahead and send this back to the Business Chat Sandbox and in the transcript, in the Sandbox, on the right, we have the time that I've selected notified to the business.

Now, I did mention that we have this location detail. So on the iPhone, once I've sent this back to the business, I can actually go ahead and tap that bubble and I get the information that I've sent back, including the time and location. From here, I can easily add this appointment right to my calendar or get directions right in Maps to the location that I've specified.

OK, we're going to close that. Great. So these are highlighting some of the built-in interactions that you may encounter when you're interfacing with Business Chat, but we also wanted to highlight that you can integrate this with your own messages apps and take more advantage of the native power of iOS. So let's switch over to the My App tab. And let's talk about this.

From here, we have a bunch of fields that you can use to communicate with your message app. The top two fields allow you to link to the app, allow your customer to link to the app in case they don't have it installed. You pull out your iTunes URL ID and enter that here and you provide your app name, which is shown in the transcript.

Then we have the URL field. So in messages apps, one of the preferred ways to communicate between your messages apps is actually via URL. And you can put URL keys and values here that the app can then read. Down below we have the team identifier and bundle identifier. These are used so iOS actually knows which message extension to instantiate.

And we have an optional session identifier used in case you have multiple message app transactions going at once, you can then identify, which one you're actually talking about. Live Message Layouts, as Grant mentioned, is a new feature in iOS 11 that lets your message bubbles draw all the content, providing way more functionality, native functionality from iOS, right in the messages transcript.

However, if you're sending these to older iOS devices, they might not support Live Message Layout as well as other platforms such as the Mac or the Watch. For that, we allow you to enter the information that you may have for the fallback bubble so at least they can see that something was received on those devices. So I'm going to go ahead and drag in some content I have for the app here.

And OK, so now you see these fields are filled out and I have specified some URL parameters, which are then read by the built-in message app on the device. So I have preinstalled already on this iPhone a message app so I don't have to go and show you how that can download from the app store. On the right, you can also see the JSON contents is now updated with the fields like you've seen above, app ID, app name, URL, some other information including the received message fallback information.

So I'm going to go ahead and send this but before I do, remember I've established communication with this business already. So time may have passed and what this bubble is going to highlight is I actually have a shipment that's scheduled for delivery today. So I'm going to send that now and you'll see that I have these T-shirts scheduled for delivery today at WWDC. Now there's supposed to be -- There's the map there. Hold up. I tapped the wrong guy there. So here's -- And it's showing me a map.

Showing me a map of where those are scheduled for delivery. So this is [applause] -- This is a -- This is just a notification that may have come in randomly as you have this Business Chat environment set up. But -- And actually, this is also using Live Message Layout. So you can see I have a map here and the bubble format has this green footer. It doesn't look anything like the bubbles that you may have seen in iOS 10. That's because this is all drawing the content natively.

So what you can see is I have these T-shirts scheduled for WWDC and they're scheduled for delivery today but it looks like on the map that they're scheduled for somewhere in San Francisco. So that's not right. Let's tap this bubble and bring up our message app. And now you can see that I have incorrectly scheduled these T-shirts for Moscone.

But now we're down in San Jose. So we're going to have to do something about that, but before we do, you can see that this is actually this is a live map that I have here inside Messages. Everything you can do with Messages apps, you can do here in the Business Chat and this -- And we also have our current location here in San Jose. So you're able to tie in to all of the great powerful features of iOS, right in your business chat. This is not a web page.

So now we'd like to reroute these to here because this is the last day of the show and we really got to get these T-shirts here. So I'm going to tap my current location and let's specify that we want the shipment rerouted to my current location. There's a $15 charge but I'll have to expense that.

We're going to go ahead and confirm that we want this rerouted to San Jose Convention Center and I'm going to go ahead and send that back to the business. And you'll see in the Business Chat Sandbox, now we've received the URL, which specifies the new location that we've designated for the shipment.

Great. So that's showing integration with your messages apps. But there's one more thing and that we've scheduled a reroute and that's going to cost us $15. So for that we're going to request a payment from our customers using Apple Pay. Now I'm going to drag in our Apple Pay JSON here and you see we have our familiar received message at the top specifying an image and title and subtitle of this bubble. And down below, we can specify our items. Here, we have a same-day shipment reroute that going to cost you 15 bucks and we have a total price as well. Optionally now, we can also specify shipping methods.

For this, this actually is the reroute. So I'm not going to specify shipping methods. We also have fields that you may be familiar with if you've done Apple Pay development in the past. We have -- If you'd like to specify the Apple Pay sheet should require your billing address or your shipping address and what merchant capabilities your platform may contain.

Now these are all standard Apple Pay functions. We didn't do anything custom here. So if you're familiar developing with Apple Pay, this is, these are things that you've already implemented. We also followed a very common Apple Pay JS format for the JSON, which I'll show you over here.

So for the JSON for this request, we have our received message and we have our images, as you've seen before, but now we have a payment object which contains a payment request. This contains line items, same day shipment reroute for 15 bucks, and a total. And then we also have our Apple Pay section, which contains information for what networks we support, merchant capabilities, and what types of currency we support.

Now at the bottom, here, you'll also see we have some other URLs and this is kind of interesting. So what we've done is we've provided a bunch of URLs that you can use when you integrate Apple Pay with your business. The first one, payment Gateway URL, allows your business to send its encrypted payload to actually process the payment.

Great. We also have three URLs that are used when the Apple Pay sheet is up on the screen. If you change your payment method from let's say a debit card to a credit card, we're going to hit this URL so you may want to in some cases maybe change what offerings you have. Some businesses may offer discounts for certain types of cards.

When you change your shipping method, we also have a chance to hit a server and update your shipment items. So let's say we are switching from ground to overnight delivery, we might have to update your line items and your total. And then your shipping contact, if suddenly I want this package delivered to Hawaii, you might want to update all your shipping methods, line items, and totals.

We then have a fallback URL, which is used in case the customer doesn't have Apple Pay on their device. You can then specify a URL that when tapping the Apple Pay bubble will take you to a web page of your choice. And then finally, an order tracking URL. This is used once the payment is complete. So we've already sent the payment through the payment gateway URL but your business may have a separate system that handles all your orders and that's what this URL is used for.

Great. OK, let's send this to the device so we can collect this $15 and gets these T-shirts. So you see on the device now up comes our shipment reroute Apple Pay Button. And I can go ahead and just tap this bubble and up pops the familiar Apple Pay sheet. From here, all I have to do is touch ID. The payment gets processed, sent back to the business, and the bubble is updated with paid, and that's it.

Alright, so let's go back to some slides. Business Chat Sandbox is available at this URL. We think this is really cool and it's a way where you can just jump in, get started with Business Chat today with your iOS 11 device. We're really excited to see what kind of great experiences you can create. And with something like Business Chat Sandbox, you really have a sketchpad to create the next great business customer experience. Thank you.

Thanks, Scotty. That was great. Alright, step two, get connected. You need to work with a customer service platform that supports Business Chat and we've already integrated with LivePerson, Nuance, Genesys, and Salesforce. These companies can help you get your business ready for Business Chat. These companies will help you connect, route your messages, and integrate your iMessage apps. They'll also add intelligent tools to enhance your agent productivity and help you manage your communications across your various channels.

Next, step three. You can apply now for early access to Business Chat by going to register.apple.com. And as a final note, when designing your solution, please keep in mind that your customers today understand the Call button. They know the type of support that they will receive from you when they use the telephone. Now, when they see your new Message button, they should know that they'll receive the equivalent or better support with Business Chat. Help us make Business Chat an awesome user experience right out of the gate.

So to recap, we went through the various entry points. You can use them to help customers find your business. We also reviewed the built-in features, the iMessage apps that you can use to create a great customer experience. So start today at developer.apple.com/ businesschat. For more information about the session, you can also go here. Thanks, everyone.