P113: All Bots Everything

Smart folks like Chris Messina have been talking a lot lately about “Conversational Commerce,” the ability to deliver information and brand experiences through natural language, meeting their customers where they live — their messaging apps. Industry observers like Casey Newton have been tracking these trends closely and went deep earlier this year on The Search for the Killer Bot. Even Adweek have is getting into it, so it was no surprise that Facebook’s F8 conference was all about the bot.

“We think that you should just be able to message a business in the same way that you message a friend,” Zuckerberg said. And it was so. And the bots were bad, but the tech journalists were cautiously non-committal as to whether this was A Good Thing because, really, what tech journalist can afford to write off and/or anger Facebook?

All the geeks go on about how hard it is to make a decent chatbot and all the marketing folks are worried about getting the brand voice just so and of course the Simpsons did it first.

It’s a bot, bot, bot, bot world.

Periodically yours,

Bob Sherron

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Originally published at periodically.co on April 20, 2016.