The recent F8 developers conference by Facebook, the most talked about news has been about opening its messaging platform (Messenger) to developers. No more than two weeks ago Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, noted that “Chatbots are the next big thing”. Yes messaging is huge, only on Messenger and Whatsapp people exchange 600 billion messages a day, and if you have a teen at home you know that that is the future of communications.
However, messaging so far it has been mainly a personal space requiring the ability to conduct a conversation with the counterpart, which means both parts have to have the ability to understand immediately what is communicated and reply appropriately. That is the reason why we still have to navigate through telephone calls that go like: “press 1 for account information, press 2 for technical support, press 10 for a customer service representative (finally!) …” every time we have a problem or require specific information quickly. Right at the intersection of customer service and messaging app popularity is where the chatbots come in: they eliminate the need of human counterpart allowing companies to conduct any such conversations at any moment with an automated program, thus opening a new frontier for corporate colonization.
But what is a chatbot? As its name indicates: chat, as in conversation, bot, as in robot, a chatbot is a program that simulates human language and can answer in human-like form to voice or written queries. Siri and Cortana are two early examples to which most of us are now familiar with, or in its most advanced form it is HAL9000 of “2001 Space Odyssey” memory. So yes, chatbots are a first form of artificial intelligence to be widely adopted in communications. So is it good bye to most of those telemarketing, telesales jobs? Not so fast friend, just last March 30th, Tay, Microsoft twitting bot has been taken off line after a couple of accidents involving racist comments and other inappropriate tweets. However, looking at the resources these companies are putting into it and the buzz they are creating the final deployment of chatbots is in a near future.
Why are chatbots the next big thing? The future of media is all about customization, personalization, as users demand a swift and meaningful UX to remain engaged, a task particularly arduous for companies vis a vis the proliferation of channels and touchpoints, that’s why these virtual assistants are so important. With chatbots companies can build their presence in this wide virgin territory that is messaging and keep the communications (and sales) flowing effortlessly.
Facebook has announced a first important step by opening its messaging platform to developers thus indicating that chatbots will be the new apps. Let’s say you like brand XYZ shoes and you add their bot to your messenger contacts and you’ll never be more than a couple of taps away from your next purchase with them: ask a question, buy now, save for later etc..Are they really the next big thing or is just hype? Well in the end it doesn’t make much difference because if the big players over there (Microsoft, Facebook, etc..) have decided that they are what’s coming, then the WILL BE.
Next we will see how the other top players in this league i.e.: Google, Apple and Amazon will pick up the challenge and shape the future of things to come.