Building bots won’t guarantee interaction on demand

Ted Livingston’s interaction on demand thesis is spot on, especially once you add physical discovery to the mix. But lightweight as they may be, bots alone won’t guarantee interaction on-demand.

“There would be no app to download”…except for whatever app contains or is able to run that bot. This could be an all purpose platform such as Kik, Telegram and WeChat, or any major brand (British Airways, MOMA, Transport for London) that feels bots would augment or expand its physical and virtual service architecture.

“No new account to create”…except whatever credentials the parent app may require.

“No new UI to learn”…unless each parent app aims to ‘differentiate’ at the UI layer.

And so we’re back to downloading and managing many dozens of (albeit smaller and better targeted) ‘apps’…

Unless of course, a handful of multi-purpose (social) platforms grow to such a point that they become the de-facto ‘bots + everything else on the internet’ environment. Smaller brands and orgs (…just about anyone with a sub-billion-user audience?) will have little choice but to create bots and services within these platforms, and this will further reinforce their position as a primary interface to the Internet.

“…Facebook is more like infrastructure now — like roads and bridges and plumbing, the kind of networks we all rely on.”
 — Wired

A far more positive scenario would be to support bots at the OS-level. Brands might have to build a few variants of their bots (one for each major OS), but by leveraging OS-level components and APIs, bot downloads could be smaller, their content and services more versatile, their UI more consistent, and users would enjoy some level of universal sign-on, preference, and privacy management.

But here’s the thing…

If we find value in a more neutral and interoperable vision, is it not worth considering how we might create a truly universal bot environment? One where the device itself might be the browser for any number of ‘apps’ that we could discover, share and interact with as easily as we currently do a web site.

From a user perspective, that certainly feels like a friendlier, more sustainable, and more valuable outcome. I’m also not entirely convinced that platforms wouldn’t benefit in the end. After all, the internet we know today is but a prototype of what the next few billion of us may build.