Are you ready to start talking to robots?
This week, my column in Spanish news site El Español (in Spanish) discusses the recent announcement by WhatsApp that it is to focus on providing customer service for corporate clients, along with Facebook’s use of robotic assistants for Facebook Messenger, as well as the recent piece by Kik founder and CEO Ted Livingston here on Medium.
Chatbots are hardly a new thing: efforts to meet the ongoing challenge of passing the Turing test go back many years now. Companies like Ashley Madison and other dating services have developed bots aimed at convincing gullible (mainly) men to part with cash on the basis of correspondence with (mainly) women supposedly eager to have sex with them. Kik itself has been offering its users bots able to discuss how to made a video or that can offer fashion tips, etc.
Now, we are seeing the beginnings of a process that will combine familiar interfaces such as instant messaging with robots able to accept commands and generate responses. In short, the way we use instant messaging will change, and they will become the navigator we use to access a series of services carried out by bots, in other words, the new generation of web sites. This means we could ask for news, search for stuff on the internet via this new combination. Of course, Siri and other virtual assistants already have these capacities, albeit latent. We “talk” to them, and they “talk” back: it’s an interface that isn’t an interface, if you like, even if the output or result is still a website.
You might ask whether we’re psychologically prepared to start talking on a daily basis to robots. The answer is that we’re probably more prepared than we realize…
(En español, aquí)
