App Fatigue? Chatbots Maybe the Answer
I love apps. I have been building apps since 2008. Back then I really did not know what I was doing. My first app was a single table with a navigation bar along the top. Over the last 7 years things have really moved on, we understand how best to layout the UI, where we should enhance with animations and provide flourishes such as force touch for deeper interaction. Consequently, apps are now much larger both in features and download size. They offer an experience that immerses you, providing features that are better or more rich than the desktop apps they replaced.
However, I don’t always want to download your app. Some interactions such as ordering a pizza, booking a taxi or buying a new t-shirt are better off without the delay of downloading an app. In today’s world you need to provide your service instantly, please don’t make me download your 50mb+ app. Im sure many of you have had this experience and like me you probably just don’t download the app. For example Starbucks is everywhere but only 16% of customers use their app. These one off interactions should be instant, your app needs to get the user to their destination as fast as possible. Downloading an app for these quick tasks acts as a barrier and potentially a lost sale.
Starbucks is everywhere but only 16% of customers use their app. — Tweet This
So what is the solution? How can we get the user to their destination as fast as possible? The answer is using an app that the customer already has on their device. We could use the web browser but this is often slow and does not offer a great mobile user experience. We could use social media apps however, the tide is changing and they are no longer the most used apps. As Chris Messina has shown is his recent article, messaging apps have eclipsed social networks in monthly active users:
So we need to look at messaging apps. WhatsApp has 900 million monthly active users, Facebook Messenger has 800 million and Twitter has 300 Million. So the chances of your users having one of these apps on their phone is extremely high.
WhatsApp has 900 million, Facebook Messenger has 800 million and Twitter has 300 Million monthly active users. — source (http://www.statista.com/)
Facebook has been quick to understand this with the release of M, a chatbot virtual assistant that runs inside Facebook Messenger. You can chat to it like its human and answers come either via AI or when the question is too tough, actual humans respond. Facebook is not keeping this new type of interaction to itself. It was recently reported on techcrunch that Facebook is going to be opening up a Messaging SDK for developers to build their own chatbots on the platform.
Facebook is not the only tech company making moves in this space. Google have a secret messaging platform that will be released soon. Slack the enterprise messaging platform has created a chatbot directory and even a fund to support new ideas. Lastly, WhatsApp competitor Telegram has its own bot platform. With all this movement it's hard for a developer to ignore the shift that is coming.
I have started my journey and I'm currently building my first chatbot as I try to understand the best way to build to this new interface. There are a few challenges around Natural Language Processing and Chat SDK integration. However, the biggest challenge so far is that of personality. How do you make the chatbot feel like it’s not a robot? I hope that I can answer that in a future blog post. For now here are a few useful links on getting started with chatbot development:
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