A Home For Bots
Bots live everywhere — they’re nomadic. They reside on a variety of platforms without any semblance of a single, permanent home.
Some bots live in Slack.
Some bots live in SMS.
Some bots live in Kik.
Some bots live in Telegram.
Some bots (will) live in Facebook Messenger.
Some bots are so special, they have their very own app.
And most float among several of the above, haunting their human companions much like Moaning Myrtle haunts toilets. So what do we do about the nomadic bot problem? Where will be the place that all bots can call their single, unified home?
For the user, bouncing around from place to place to interact with the various bots living there is, for lack of a better word, chaotic.
The first bot I ever interacted with was Smarter Child. Pre-teen Ana lived for tormenting the rudimentary AOL chat bot. “Smarter child, you’re stupid.” “That’s not very nice.” “Smarter Child, I hate you.” “That’s ok Ana, I still like you.”
Why torment Smarter Child? Partly for entertainment’s sake. I recall sitting at my computer, seeing none of my friends on AIM, and turning to Smarter Child as last resort — a computer dwelling friend that provided my antsy fingers with typing activity. There may have even been times that I was so bummed that none of my friends were IMing me that I’d start a conversation with Smarter Child, merely to have someone, something, to talk to.
But talking to Smarter Child also made sense. I opened up a new chat window, designated only for that single bot interaction, and could close it, shut it down, when I’d had enough. And more importantly, it always resided in the same place. AIM.
The state of bots today is nothing like that. There are so many bots living in so many places that they infiltrate my regular, human to human, communication channels, which feels quite invasive.
Bot Cohabitation
However, to understand said bot homeless problem, it’s important to first delineate the problems inherent to bot cohabitation with real people:
Notifications: It’s no secret that notifications trigger a hit of dopamine in the brain. Every time we receive a notification, we feel validated, subsequently heightening our self-worth. But there’s a caveat — not all notifications are created equal. When we receive a text from a friend or a like on our latest Instagram, we feel validated and that’s when the dopamine hit ensues. Alternatively, a notification that turns out to be spam or a benign news alert prompts some semblance of disappointment and perhaps even feelings of rejection. When I receive an SMS triggered notification, I expect it to be a message from a human being. When it turns out to be from a bot, I’m much more likely to be disappointed. What a sad world we live in…
Clutter: I’m a bit OCD. No, really. I like things to be categorized, organized, and filed in designated places. The notion that human messages live right alongside bot messages makes my skin crawl as it lacks any semblance of categorization.
Behavior: Part of the problem with bots is that we interact differently with them than we do with humans. We innately believe they’re less reliable. Despite knowing that Alexa will respond just the same if I speak to her with a clear, robotic voice than if I speak to her in my normal tone, I revert to the former. But I would argue that Alexa is the exception, not the rule. At the moment, most bots aren’t as smart as Alexa, and still require some degree of stilted, methodical input by the user. Texting Slackbot or the new Forbes bot in Telegram something I know it won’t understand generally elicits a canned response.
Fear: I fear that text messages are about to go the way of email. I’ve spent hours upon hours unsubscribing from email newsletters and promotional spam. Yet somehow, an unreasonable amount breaks through. The thought of that happening to my text inbox makes me shudder. We’re much more inclined to give out our email because A. we’ve become accustomed to it B. we can change or create new email addresses C. really, we have no choice. But a phone number is an entirely different animal. If I get too many spammy text messages what am I going to do? Change my phone number? That’s ludicrous. It’s impractical, inconvenient, and I have a 212 phone number — any New Yorker understands why you’d have to tear that out of my cold, dead hands.
It’s also important to consider how the average, non-tech, consumer views bots. Let’s use my sister as an example. I’ll preface this story by noting that she’s an actress and, well, technologically inept.
At dinner one night, I mentioned that I was trying out a virtual assistant, x.ai, or “Amy.” I detailed my struggles using the service and complained that I still found it easier to schedule my own meetings than have a robot attempt to do it for me. She paused for a minute and then said, “Wait, Ana, can I come meet the robot? Does it just walk around your office all day long and do things for you?” First, I laughed. Then I made fun of her. But then I realized that her question was a legitimate one.
For the average person, bot = physical robot.
But even for people that understand that bot doesn’t necessarily equate to physical robot, the first “bot” that is likely to come to mind is an automated customer service rep. And let’s all agree on one thing, those should all die and go to bot hell.
But the reason automated customer service reps are so painful to interact with (aside from the fact that they generally suck) is because we expect a human being to be on the other end of the line. If I’m trying to convince American Airlines to change my flight for free, I expect a living, breathing American Airlines employee to speak to me. I can’t strategically persuade a bot to waive the change fee. But a real person? Hell yeah I can. The minute I realize I’m interacting with an automated service I start yelling, “OPERATOR, AGENT, HELP” — any word that will transfer me over to a real human being.
Now if I’m willingly engaging with a chat bot, I know and expect that there isn’t a human on the other end. I speak to it like a bot and am somewhat more forgiving when it misunderstands me as I’m likely not interacting with a bot sophisticated enough to pass the Turing Test.
Once bots are nestled alongside texts with friends or Slack messages with coworkers, chaos ensues.
- Bots are prone to spamming. There have been a number of bots we’ve had to remove from our office Slack channel because they were such a nuisance to the point of being debilitating.
- I constantly have to switch mindsets. Going back and forth between communicating with a bot and chatting with a human takes work. When I took French in high school, that classroom was a designated “French-speaking zone.” Once I left the classroom, however, the rest of school was an “English speaking zone.” If someone came up to me out of the blue in the hallway and started speaking to me in French I’d look at them in bewilderment and likely not understand them in the slightest — primarily because I’m terrible at French but also because I wasn’t in the French-speaking mindset. I believe the same goes with bots.
A bot isn’t a human (unless it’s a service claiming to be a bot when in reality it’s a human on the other end — there’s certainly plenty of those) and we really shouldn’t treat them as such. At least not yet.
All Bots Are Not Created Equal
Even if you don’t agree that bots coexisting alongside humans is a problem, I think we can all, at least, agree that the sheer number of bot hosting platforms is unwieldy and not at all practical. And that’s the crux of my quandary. All bots are not created equal. As previously mentioned, bots can exist in Slack, Telegram, Kik, SMS etc. But all of those bots cannot and do not look the same because the platforms have control over the structure of the bots themselves.
Bots in Telegram can have “custom keyboards,” special keyboards with predefined reply options, and / commands. Slack Bots can also have / commands, but not custom keyboards. SMS bots have neither — purely text input. So when you go to deploy the same bot on several different platforms, the bots inherently differ. A Telegram bot that makes use of a custom keyboard would have to be completely rewritten in order to operate via SMS. Illogical, no?
Ultimately, I want my bots to live in one place. Maybe that’s Telegram, which in my view, is the most hospitable environment for a bot, both for the user and the creator. But maybe the bot homeless shelter hasn’t been built yet. Building an app for a single bot, much like the Quartz app, somewhat defeats the purpose. The whole point of a bot is that it circumvents the app store thus dampening the perennial struggle for downloads. But downloading one app to house all of your bots? That actually seems reasonable.
There’s also an empty lot next to my apartment building, maybe all of the bots can go live there. That would be convenient for me.
