Are chatbots the next big thing?

Different sets of people may have different definitions of what bots are depending on how they interact with bots.However, I would like to think of a bot as a software with a conversation like interface, that is characterised by an application responding to a text or voice command.

We constantly interact with chart platforms on a daily basis.We use slack to communicate at work, Facebook messenger and a lot of other chart platforms that I have not mentioned. There has been a big increase on the number of people using chat platforms as compared to those using social media platforms.This I guess, resulted to businesses strategizing on how they can use these chart platforms to create better experiences to their customers.And behold…chatbots were born!

The talk about chatbots was made more exciting when technology giants such as Facebook and Microsoft made announcements that they were going to power them as big platforms that other people could leverage on.One of the other reasons I believe that has resulted to chatbots getting tractions is the fact that having an intuitive conversation results to a better user experience than having an interface navigation.This may result to people using messaging services instead of the apps that we are used to.And this is already happening in some instances.

For instance, CNN has a bot on Facebook messenger that sends you a list of stories for the day and you can ask the bot to pull up stories on a certain topic.Burger King also has a Facebook messenger bot that can converse with you to make an order, shows you a menu and asks you for your pick up location.Users of KLM airlines have access to a Facebook messenger bot from which they can receive their booking confirmation, check-in notification, boarding pass, and flight status updates.It is also possible to order an Uber via Messenger.

At a more advanced level, chatbots could use artificial intelligence to become our personal assistants or even act as customer cares by responding to complaints or questions from a business’ customers.With chatbots increasingly growing in numbers and complexity, there is one question that arises, are chatbots a paradigm shift in human and computer interactions?