The battle of apps and bots

We recently hear it a lot, bots are the new apps or bots will replace apps, and everyone is trying to show what bots can do and how it will replace apps in the future. So will bots replace apps? I think the answer is yes and no, let me explain.

Before we dig in, I should mention that there is a difference between a chatbot and a bot. A chatbot is an interface that talks to a bot, a bot is a service that executes a specific job.

Ok, so we all have around 5 or 6 apps that we use every day, in my case, it happens to be Medium, Audible, Facebook and co, YouTube, Calendar, and Quora.

You can easily argue that my Calendar can be replaced with a bot which is definitely true, but what about YouTube or Audible? Aha, so they must be two different things, the first is a service, and the second is a platform. A calendar is a service, booking tickets, ordering food, requesting an Uber are all services, I even can even teach my bot to tell my Arduino to feed my cat which is also a service, but can we have a bot for Audible or YouTube? Possible, the bot can suggest videos for me, or perform a search on a specific keyword, or notify me when Mattias Johansson uploads a new video to his channel, but it’s completely on the platform to play that video, unless there is a device that is completely flexible and extensible that I can use and connect to other connected devices, like Amazon Echo, for example.

Platforms can’t be replaced with bots (at least for now) but it could have a bot that complements the service it gives in terms of they way we interact with it.

Amazon Echo for example, teaching Alexa a skill is very similar to building a bot, the only difference is that it speaks, it doesn’t write back the responses for you, but what if Alexa is connected to projector that I have in my living room and I can ask Her to look for a video on YouTube and display it on my projector , what if I can write a ‘bot’ or a skill that could tell Alexa to send my self-driving car to pick a friend up in a given location?

I can now ask Alexa to remind me about a meeting I have, a Facebook bot can also do that even with a voice command, so the concept is the same, a service that you can interact with in a specific way.

So if I go back to the initial argument “bots will replace apps”, I think bots will replace apps only when the device that hosts apps disappears, and this by itself is an argument.

I can see chatbots replacing a lot of apps, or one chatbot to rule them all, connected to all the services that you need, and that will leave us with the a limited number of apps installed (or bundled) on your mobile device.

Opening Siri for developers will probably be the first step to ‘one bot to rule them all’.