The Battle of the Bots: when AI runs the world
Yes, You May Speak To Pizza About This
Hello, is there anybody in there
Feeling lonely? Want to talk to your pizza, your car, or your book? The rise of conversational interface brings us a whole new content form, part text, part survey, part chat.
The most interesting and fresh application of this that I came across was released today by Typeform. It’s bots meeting beautiful design, great example of what can be done with bots within familiar contexts.
So now thanks to Typeform and the rest of the bot overlords, your next survey might be a story. Your next story might be a conversation. Your next conversation might become a multimedia work of fiction (you’re doing this already, just open any of your texting apps).
So do we want to chat or don’t we?
This week is a pretty big deal for chatbots, as Facebook rolled out its Messenger Platform update that, according to Techcrunch, pushes menu buttons over chat, downgrading the ‘chat’ part of chatbots. Another good overview of the updates and examples of popular bots is here.
If you think about it, we’ve been chatting and texting for a while now. Texting is how people “talk” these days, to anyone and anything:
- Wattpad’s new “addictive chat stories” app Tap is crashing it in the App Store.
- If you feel like chatting with your news, Quartz is on it.
- Or use your voice (really the next cool thing, imho) and talk to Siri, or Alexa.
Twitter could be credited with staring at the forefront of this trend, and then WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram, Kik, Intercom, Amazon Echo and FB Messenger caught up and took over, Facebook in particular driving the adoption of chat bots through its bots API for Messenger, and Amazon Echo successfully monetizing Alexa.
We haven’t yet settled on what to call these UIs: they’re the ‘personal assistants’ which sounds like an old-fashioned cliche. They’re your ‘chatbots’, ‘conversational interfaces’, and ‘interactive experiences’, or, my personal favourite, ‘fake AIs’. But they’re already changing the way we get things done, just about ready to cross the chasm and win big in the mainstream.
That said, wasn’t the whole point of technology to avoid unwanted conversational interactions? Uber comes to mind. And yet, we have Siri now, judging the weather outside as being ‘not very good’ with no context, and who asked Siri for its opinion on the weather anyway. How would you like for Spotify to judge your playlist choices. And should your bot call you “mate” if you’re from Down Under. So many questions.
Of course, if you did want to talk about the weather with someone, Poncho can take care of you and maybe even make you laugh. Or you can ask a bot psychic what to do with your life. But um, I’d rather not, just want my information with no judgement or humour, thanks.
Last words on bots
In the battle of the bots, my imaginary pile of big money is on Amazon Echo, with voice being the most human HCI, with even more centralization in the forecast. Get ready for the master bot to emerge, eating all the other bots and sucking them in as mere modulars and data points, the whole ecosystem becoming a backend.
If you’ve seen interesting applications of chat as interface, pls add below. Curious, would love to collect a few good ones.
