The Rise of the Bots
Bot service ideas and thoughts on what the future of bots will bring
In the past few days I’ve very often had conversations with friends and colleagues around bots. About learning conversational bots and transactional bots. For whom they’ll be useful, how huge their potential is, how valuable and powerful they could be to assist and support us in our everyday life. How they can help us innovate. How bots can help us save time in our day-to-day.
Messenger apps are launching bot platforms one by one. Bot platforms like Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Kik or Slack already today have an immense amount of reach — tendency rising. Messenger apps are easy to access by everyone. They come with great UX out of the box and are easy to use. And the barrier to entry for building a bot compared to building a (mobile) app with great UX is way lower.
I’d like to provide a few bot service examples to get you in the mood for real world use cases:
Food Delivery Service Bot
Imagine talking to the Facebook Messenger bot of your favorite food delivery service. As soon as you say “Hi” it asks you right away “Pizza Margherita delivered to your home, as usual?”. You press the thumbs up button and the pizza is on your way. If you’d have replied “No” the bot suggests the latest 3 orders you made rated with 5 stars.
Meal Suggestion Bot
Or imagine a bot that provides you ideas every day on what to eat based on the ingredients you let it know. Let’s say you’ve got cheese and pasta at home and send it by text or through uploading an image of your fridge. The bot replies “How about mac and cheese?”. Alternatively you also see suggestions via buttons to choose a vegan version of the dish and a button saying “Other meals” to show you different meals that are likely to match your taste. But you go for the bots initial suggestions. And with a single tap you press thumbs up and there’s the recipe.
The bot will continue returning recipes until you’re happy. And based on the ingredients you entered over time it starts to learn and suggest meals every day that you’ll likely enjoy.
Cycling Route Bot
Say you are traveling with your bike. Imagine Bikemap or Strava providing a Facebook Messenger bot for suggesting cycling routes. Imagine you are looking for a route when being in San Francisco. You only have 2 hours time. You are in the Mission. Where should you go for a beautiful ride?
You enter “I need to be back in 2 hours, what’s a nice ride around here?”.
Through buttons the bot asks you “Mountain Bike, Road Bike or Cross Bike?”. You tap “Road Bike” and the bot returns the perfect route.
Then you’re about to visit Vienna. You’d like a route with 2 climbs, you have 4 hours of time. Here you go.
Bots and the future
Bots have immense potential and I think they will be present in our everyday life in the future. I also think we’ll once have one single multi-platform bot accessible on any of our devices and environments. A bot that understands when you are on your smartphone, wearable device, at home, in your car or on your bike. A bot that learns how you prefer to interact with it, in which environment and in which mood you are when.
Apart from that I assume in the near future every brand, service and environment will look into providing some kind of bot. For onboarding, for entertainment, for support, for training. Right at hand on your devices or on-site. Retail stores, warehouses, parks, event locations, gasoline stations, etc. Imagine a Facebook Messenger bot that works with local Apple stores. Asking you “How can I help you?” when entering the store. You type or say by speech recognition “I’d like to buy the latest iPhone”. Seconds later you get your new iPhone delivered (probably by a bot 🤖).
I think the interaction with bots will feel very natural going forward. The level of bot content quality and value will be high and you’ll be able to have natural conversations. The information you receive by bots will be valuable and precisely matching to the context. User interaction patterns are being learned and suggestions are being improved in that sense.
Non-supported inputs will be handled perfectly. For example by showing you value you didn’t even expect and being intelligently redirected into the right or better direction. If your input is out of context, you’ll get driven back and suggested how the bot can actually help you.
We’ll be able to use them effortless and value will be returned fast.
The bot era is on.
