Is it still collaboration if you’re interacting with a bot?
ReadyTalk is hosting an internal “Bot Month” this May. If you’ve been living under a rock for the past 6 months, 2016 has been lauded as the Year of the Bot. With over 800 results for “bot” on ProductHunt, it certainly seems that producers and consumers alike are flocking to these formless assistants.
Why is a cloud communications company spending a month digging into bots?
Bots live in a platform you already use. Commonly considered the next evolution of apps, bots are available from a platform you (hopefully) already use. If you’re one of the 2.3 Million daily Slack users, you don’t have to leave the application to find out the weather, to order a pizza, or hail an Uber.
This platform strategy is a win-win-win: you don’t have the inconvenience of having to go to a specific app to perform an action, Slack gets to keep you in its ecosystem, and you’re still connecting with the service that can provide you the information you’re wanting. (weather.com, Dominos or Uber in the above examples).
Slack isn’t the only bot-ready platform. A quick glance at the newly launched botlist.co lists the following platforms: Android, Email, Facebook messenger, iPhone, Kik, Slack, SMS, Telegram and Web. More to come, I’m sure.
Bots can automate simple tasks. In the examples above, the service the bot provided was pretty straightforward. “Access a service and perform this action”. Something you could do yourself or outsource to an assistant, except this one doesn’t chew gum loudly and check her watch for her lunch break every few moments. Outsourcing straight-forward, repetitive tasks to a bot can free we humans up for more unique, valuable activities.
One simple example I’ve seen is in the Colorado Product slack channel. One of the key “real life” activities of the group is a monthly meetup. There is a slackbot set up within the team so that when someone says “meetup”.. well..
Simple? Sure. Helpful? Yes. Annoying? Occasionally ;-)
Think about the things you do frequently enough that you could describe how to do them to someone else. Then do that, so you can focus on more meaningful activities. Tim Ferriss introduced the concept in his 2007 book “The Four Hour Workweek” but he was talking about outsourcing to live assistants. Nearly a decade later, we are much closer to being able to use bots, or simple programs, to perform a lot of rote tasks for us.
In his presentation at SxSW Interactive, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield shared a vision of a platform with bots that can even eliminate many of the “project management” tasks performed by middle management.
One of the first slackbots, Howdy.ai, was designed to help with lunch orders and daily standups. The program would send individual messages to users to get their orders/updates, pull it all together, and report back on it. Indeed, the collecting and aggregating of data is a fundamental computational task.
Because for all their cute names and avatars, bots are just that: simple computational programs. What are computers good at? Following rules. Keeping track of lots of data, and identifying patterns in that data. A bot can be passively monitoring an exchange, gathering data and surfacing insights from that data in a way our feeble human brains may not be able to (because we’re actively focused on other things).
At ReadyTalk, we’ve spent the past 14 years developing technology that connected individuals so they can be more productive and thrive. In 2016, we can do more than just be the conduit through which you interact with your co-workers. With all the tools out right now to create and host bots, everyone can play a role in the bot gold rush, and that’s why we’re rallying employees from across the company to get involved in this initiative. Great products and services stem from customer problems, and our laser focus on our customers means everyone has valuable insights that can play into the design and development of your next favorite bot :-)
Interested in learning more about Bot Month? Got a suggestion for us? Email dart@readytalk.com — we look forward to hearing from you!
