Why SMS is a better bot platform than Facebook Messenger
A few months ago I texted Digit one simple word, “Hello”. Digit replied with a URL to link my bank account. Digit was friendly, told the occasional joke and was on a mission to help me to save more cash.
The user experience was terrific. No complex menu systems to learn, no app to download, no installation and no difficult search for real estate on my home screen. Just a simple text every day to let me know how much was being automatically saved and notifications of any major changes to my bank balance.
Digit and I were in love.
Fast forward to today and popular messaging apps have been going bot crazy. First Kik and now Facebook Messenger bots all delivered through messaging apps. It reminds me of the bots used frequently in IRC (Internet Relay Chat) days to do all sorts of things from getting server updates to playing poker.
But like most things major tech companies launch these days bots and their part in the future of user interface seem mostly overhyped and bound to take many casualties. Great ideas risk being birthed into the grave.
The seemingly obvious issue with Facebook Messenger bots is that they are 3 taps too deep. The sell that they will stop “app fatigue” is hard to believe when they ultimately add more friction to the mobile experience. How is tapping into messenger and starting a conversation with the CNN bot and asking for the latest headlines on Bernie Sanders a better interface than a Google Search or even using the CNN app itself?
But that’s an elementary way of thinking about bots and their role in interface.
Digit is different. It was born onto a platform every mobile device in the world supports: SMS. It keeps top of mind and isn’t buried or reliant on a platform that is experimental at best. It is one tap deep, and on a platform that is part of everyones daily habit. There is no app to download, no lengthy sign up process and no need to be reminded to login and save cash by a constant barrage of emails. Instead, SMS is a truly better interface for delivering a unique, humanized, personal and habitual experience.
This interface will not succeed for all of our bot friends, but presents a much more interesting distribution and addiction opportunity for highly personalized experiences like finance, education and healthcare.
Take an education startup founder I recently met. His problem was a need to interact with teachers daily and then pass on this information to parents and make sure they took action on that information. The idea (which I won’t disclose yet since he hasn’t launched) is game-changing. But the execution and distribution absolutely and certainly are bound to fail. Try getting parents at a school to download an app, sign up and remember to use that app daily. The idea may be brilliant, but unless the app contains a mini game of Candy Crush (and works on every platform) it’s unlikely it will get much use or be remembered.
But what about a simple SMS message to an education bot saying “Hello” to signup? What about a payment model built around premium SMS charges? All of a sudden you have a frictionless, global distribution and payment infrastructure that will infinitely scale for your new glorious bot.
Even though bots don’t feel new right now, or like a revolutionary idea, what excites me is a new found focus on using “AI” to inch our future towards the ultimate humanized and personalized bot friend of my dreams: the Star Trek Computer.
It’s becoming quite clear that this is a new era of automation and could have profound impact on how companies can scale knowledgeable, personalized and humanized experiences. Why can’t my entire Bank of America experience be as simple as Digit? Why can’t my healthcare provider remind me to have a skin cancer check up and then help me schedule that appointment? This is an exciting era of personalization and intelligence that can scale remarkable customer experiences and truly improve our lives.
But first, we need to find the right platform for our future text-based overlords. And my vote is for a platform we all have in common: SMS.
