Last week, Team Botmock was able to stop by the amazing annual SuperBot conference that is put on by the team at Dashbot.io.
Here are our top takeaways from the event!
Multi-Modal is 2019
While voice itself was more of a topic for 2018, 2019 is defined by the idea of voice-enabled screens and several brands at the event, including Mercedes-Benz, etc, etc all are actively promoting and working on multi-modal conversational solutions as a major next step in creating an amazing user experience.
Voice in Car is Coming
From the first session of the day, a panel of bot experts, there was a lot of talk of how the commute in the United States has been consistently getting longer, and with that, comes opportunities to enable amazing voice experience I the car that are functional, but not distracting.
To also build off the last point, multi-modal is rapidly becoming a major concept with voice in the automotive industry as well to allow for easy experience handoff from phone to car, among other ideas.
The Dark Side
Mentioned a few times, and as a core focus of a lighting round session by Intuit’s Scott Ganz, the dark side of users getting frustrated with bots is something that shouldn’t be put by the wayside. While conversational interfaces tend to be praised for its easy-to-use experience, it’s often easy to forgot that as solutions get more complex and robust, they can come with the downside of people getting confused and impatient.
Discoverability is (Still) Missing
Finding an Echo/Google Assistant Device is not usually a major challenge, but the bigger issue is finding skills beyond just some of the big ones. Even with a platform as big as Facebook Messenger, the interface has often stalled in terms of properly promoting bots that are relevant to the user base using Messenger.
Hopefully, 2019 and beyond will continue to offer some interesting solutions to this problem.
Investors are Still Looking
To close out the day, we saw an amazing investor insights panel which offered a lot of perspective on the state of VC and its attitude towards the Voice/Bot Industry. While a lot of B2B solutions have come up offering intriguing platforms for extending and pushing bots to the limit, the investors mentioned the idea that there is definitely something in the water when it comes to consumer conversational interfaces running as their own startups and how that is hot on their radars at the moment.
And that’s a wrap. We’d like to congratulate the team at Dashbot for putting on an amazing event, and also for their amazing new features/partnerships that they announced during the event! We look forward to being back at SuperBot in 2020!
