On conversational UI, chatbots and collective intelligence

The conversation as a medium was so far the preferred tool to interact with other ‘humans’. It allows us to share and receive information. Another way to look at it is to say that it helps us understand others and be understood by them.

The upcoming arrival of the Facebook bot store will probably mark the beginning of the conversational space conquest by AI. Beyond the benefits they’ll provide in our daily lives, we can question the impact of the human to AI conversations on our relationship with real individuals. The reasons are simple.

First, it is likely that the time we spend talking and exchanging messages with bots via messaging apps will have an impact on the time we will spend to chat with our fellow humans. And if we spend less time talking with people, we will eventually less understand them.

Secondly, unlike the human to human conversation, human to AI conversation are asymmetric. A bot will be able to maintain at the same time thousands of dialogues with users and keep these conversations in its memory. This will enable it to gain a holistic view of human thoughts and human behaviors that no individual is able to acquire.

In other words, after outsourcing part of our memory in the Internet and search engines, with chatbots we are preparing to outsource gradually our understanding of mankind in the AI.

What is paradoxical about this is that the AI will make its appearance in our daily life via messaging apps. Indeed, while their success demonstrate how it is important for us to communicate with each other, these apps will become the trojan horse for AI.

This success should not be just an opportunity for AI to make its debut. It must also be seen as an indication that we should continue to improve our means of human to human communication.

While AI, may lessen our understanding of one another as I said earlier, the goal here is to improve our understanding of each other. In other words, innovation around conversational UI may lead to the improvement of our collective intelligence.

It’s in this perspective of development of human-to-human communication with the goal to foster our understanding of the world that I started the FORUM project.

Forum is a public messaging app that differs from other platforms by one key characteristics: It merges the separate experiences of social networks, blogging platforms, search engines and messaging apps into one unique experience.

Forum is in public bêta, you can try it now on Android here

If you want to see a demo, check this presentation

If you want to know more about the vision of Forum, please read this article

Ps: This article was first published on Forum :-)