So what’s with the chatbot craze?

I was trolling Quora for questions on AI to answer this morning (as we all do) and I found one that really captured my fancy. It’s a question that I’ve personally been wondering about for a couple of weeks now and I’ve yet to see a satisfactory explanation. So I did what any self-respecting technologist would and made up an answer. Enjoy!

Why are conversational agents going mainstream now?

That’s a really good question and I’m not sure anyone really knows the answer. I think it’s safe to say that the hype isn’t really driven by technology… the only major technological advancement around the right time was DeepMind’s combination of deep learning and Q-learning, which (unfortunately) has nothing to do with any of the conversational agents (henceforth chatbots) that people are talking about and releasing.

I’m not even really sure you can attribute this current swell to “market”… I don’t think providers are releasing chatbots in response to customer demand. The reality is that chatbots generally aren’t very good user interfaces and people don’t like them. They certainly don’t request them over talking to real humans. The people building and releasing chatbots en masse right now are experimenting with a new way to combine low cost and better user experience and that’s awesome; but so few people have succeeded that I don’t really think the market is pulling for a whole bunch more.

So what really happened here? A few things I guess:

1. The massive popularity of Slack over the past ~18 months has reignited chat as one of the primary communication interfaces; you could argue that it’s the first time it’s really been a dominant interface in business environments. The initial proliferation of bots is unsurprising because it has precedents in Hipchat and IRC before it.
2. On April 12 this year Facebook opened up its Messenger platform to chatbot programmers. Messenger is the second most popular messaging platform in the world (behind WhatsApp, owned by Facebook) so it’s a massive opportunity for any person or group looking to get exposure.
3. There has been a general surge in machine learning / AI startups in the past couple of years. The reasons for that surge are a different answer, but whenever you see renewed interest in those fields a lot of it is going to translate into chatbots. Natural language interface is by far the most fascinating AI problem that we have today (solving it means solving the famous Turing test). With that surge came a number of startups building out platforms and tools for people to make chatbots. This positioned the space well for the interest in building such agents on Messenger and Slack.
4. AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol to “conquer” the game of Go. This wasn’t quite as big of a deal in the public consciousness as Deep Blue beating Kasparov, but it was up there. Again, resurgence in public interest in AI, much of which translates to natural language interface (chatbots). The media now had a reason to do a lot more coverage of all of the activity that was already happening in #1–3 above.

So what happens next?

As chatbots do become more mainstream and more people use them, people will remember how clunky current implementations of natural language interface are. It’s really hard to have a natural conversation. There’s been some improvement in agents keeping users on the approved “script”, but the reality is that it’s still not an elegant, enjoyable experience for the customer.

After an initial swell (that we’re probably in), usage of chatbots will fall off. Hopefully the swell will have propelled a number of actual useful agents to popularity and that usefulness will be sustained through the popping of the chatbot “bubble”. The lessons learned from those few successes will be integrated into the efforts of the machine learning and chatbot diehards who will continue working through the public’s fickle opinion swings.

In the background, academics will continue researching and practitioners will continue pushing the envelope. Deep learning will continue to be applied to more and more things. Moore’s law will progress. Chatbots will get closer and closer to truly natural conversation, until they finally do pass the Turing test around the mid 2030’s.