Over the last year, public awareness of bots and virtual assistants has exploded thanks to phenomena like the success of Amazon’s Alexa, the cultural prevalence of Apple’s Siri, and Facebook’s investment in their Messenger platform. Their arrival raises questions: What are they? What’s the difference between a bot and an assistant? And more importantly, why should anyone care?
First, The “What”
A bot is a product or service that you interact with through text-based conversation, and is typically very limited in functionality. Poncho, Kip, and Duolingo’s bots are all examples of this kind of software. Virtual assistants, however, are capable of a wide range of functions and features. The key players in this space right now are controllable by voice and sometimes text, and are often tied to proprietary hardware. Examples of virtual assistants include Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google Assistant.
While the term “conversational interface” applies to a wide range of experiences provided by any combination of humans, AI, and bots, for the purpose of this article, I will focus on bots and virtual assistants controlled by voice or text. Additionally, I will not be using the term “chatbots” to refer to bots themselves, as this is disingenuous; these bots are not here to chat with you, but rather to help you get something done.
In order to keep from blindly hopping aboard what could just be another tech hype train, we need to understand why bots are rising in popularity all of a sudden, and be able to better decide if this is a passing fad or a sign of a larger change in the way we interact with technology.
We Don’t Need “An App for That.”
The most easily identifiable reason for the surging popularity of bots is the declining value of native mobile apps.
According to a recent consumer survey by comScore, almost half (49%) of smartphone owners in the U.S. downloaded zero apps between March and June 2016. Despite the fact that time spent using apps increased, smartphone users limited that time to just a few apps, seven of the top 25 of which were owned by Facebook and Google. Additionally, they found that less than 25% of people who downloaded a new app would return to it a day after the first time they used it.
Apps are now exponentially less viable and interesting to audiences than they were even a year ago. The home screen on a person’s mobile phone is precious real estate, occupied by a handful of powerful, efficient, multi-functional applications that address most or all of their day-to-day needs. The fact of the matter is that these few applications are also capable of solving infrequent needs, and it’s unrealistic to expect someone to form new habits and behaviors around an entirely separate piece of software just to use it on the rare occasions that call for it. There doesn’t need to be “an app for that,” whatever “that” may be.
What if companies could provide their digital services in a place where people are already spending all of their time on their phones? What would it look like if they started to push content and functionality to where audiences already were, rather than trying to pull them into new ecosystems?
Mobile phones are tools for communication, full stop. With bots, we have an opportunity to make existing patterns of communication the main interface for near limitless functionality.
Begun, the Messaging War has.
The driving force behind the emergence of bots is the fact that messaging is the fastest-growing source of internet activity; by 2020, users will spend 21% more time messaging than they do now, compared to 18% and 14% increases in time spent on gaming and social media, respectively. In terms of raw numbers, messaging platforms are expected to add a total of 1.1 billion new users by 2018.
Bots are a symptom of a larger trend: the messaging platform war. They are one of many features that technology leaders are implementing to strengthen the value of their messaging platforms. Based on the functionality offered by their various products and services, top players like Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft stand to gain or lose the most from the way their audiences behave and where they spend their time.
In order to reach their audiences, apps and websites must go through a chain of discovery controlled by said major tech companies. App stores and content display algorithms are prime examples of this discovery control in action. Bots are seen as a way to disrupt and bypass this control chain, providing content and services directly to people. (Bots have their own discoverability issues, but I’ll get into that later.)
Deeply Personal Experiences
Chris Messina, in his article “Chat Bots Aren’t a Fad. They’re a Revolution.,” calls attention to another key factor in the rise of bots: over the last 40 years, the way we use computers has fundamentally changed.
The first generations of computers were built to provide strategic advantages to businesses and militaries by allowing people to manage, process, and analyze vast quantities of data. That these machines were tools with explicit purpose and shared by professionally-trained engineers stands in stark contrast to the fact that each of us carries around an incredibly personalized and vastly powerful supercomputer which exists to fulfill all of our desires.
Mobile technology has had an enormous impact on not just our behavior, but more importantly, on what we’ve come to expect from and how we interact with technology. Whether we’re sharing photos, booking travel plans, or managing information, we’re able to use technology the way we want. Being able to expect consistent experiences while engaging with them in a manner of your choosing is a form of “extreme personalization” identified by Messina, and conversations are the epitome of this idea. There is no form of interaction more individual than the way we converse with one another, and being able to treat conversation as an interface extends that sense of individuality to our technology even further.
Where Am I Going with This?
If trends continue as forecasted by industry experts, messaging services will become software ecosystems within themselves. Conversational interfaces will become more common, and tech companies’ investments in AI will start to pay off. As a result, the UX of bots and assistants will improve, and their functionality will become more sophisticated and human.
Bots, just like apps, are not catch-all solutions. In one of my next articles, I’ll examine the shortcomings of bots that will keep them from aiding your business. I’ll also take a look at significant UX concerns and considerations to keep in mind when developing a bot. Finally, I’ll explore the ethical concerns surrounding bots and AI. Despite the fervor of early discussions on this topic, I firmly believe that we need to spend less time carelessly espousing bots as the website-killing future of business and focus more on making sure we use this technology in a way that creates experiences people love.
Thanks for reading!
If you liked it (or didn’t), please let me know. I’d love to hear from you.
More thoughts on bots:
The Underlying Ethics of AI and Bot Design [Coming Soon!]
Psst. I have a bot.
Do you like games? Do you like mysterious dungeons? Do you like text adventure RPGs? Wait, you DO??? You should say hi here. And by “hi” I mean “Hello, Dungeon.”
Sources and Additional Reading
The 2016 U.S. Mobile App Report by comScore (9/13/16)
Almost Half of Smartphone Users Don’t Download New Apps by Madeline Farber @ Fortune (9/16/16)
Messaging apps are now bigger than social networks by Business Insider (9/20/16)
Conversational Commerce by Chris Messina (1/15/15)
Chat Bots Aren’t a Fad. They’re a Revolution. by Chris Messina (9/19/16)
2016 Will Be the Year of Conversational Commerce by Chris Messina (1/19/16)
History of Computing by Encyclopaedia Britannica
Activate Tech and Media Outlook 2016 by Activate (10/20/15)
Activate Tech and Media Outlook 2017 by Activate (10/24/16)
