Rethink Chatbot during COVID-19 Outbreak (1): The New Normal

As pandemics continues, we’ve encountered growing limits and prevention of any physical interaction in society. As a replacement for human communications, we might wonder if Chatbot can save the current situation or not? The answer is, sure. But before we start tackling these inconveniences, the truth is, we must understand all challenges and find hidden chances, at the very first step.

Challenge 1. We’ve been experiencing Long-Lasting Professional Distancing in the Chatbot Market already before the beginning of Social Distancing from pandemics.

Building Chatbots is not consumer-friendly enough for you, your friends, family, neighbors, our say, all walks of life to be highly motivated in creating bots on their own. For a human-like Chatbot requires more customized services than any template-based apps (such as Uber Eats for food delivery or Amazon.shopping for grocery shipping), people compromise pretty soon when seeing complicity.

Second, Chatbot deployment is closely connected with many complicated restrictions set by different platforms (ranging from Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram to Viber) owing to channels deployed. For example, Facebook modified its API policies for implementing Messenger bot around 2–3 times yearly. Accordingly, people who built their bot on Messenger will encounter frequent code restructuring or heavy time-consuming renewing according to every official update by the platform. Not to mention if you have bots on several platforms, for example, a language tutoring bot on both Telegram and WhatsApp.

Chance 1. Build The New Normal, Revert the Economic Order of the Chatbot-Development Cycle.

Discovering the Open-Source Development Framework of All Platforms is necessary for changing the platform-specific situation.

An open-source framework, such as Bottender, not only saves developers from compromising on budgets but protects users from compromising on using designated channels/platforms. Besides, a development framework should be declarative enough for developers to program more efficiently and conveniently. For this, designing conversational UIs on the interface is the crucial way to achieving developer-friendliness.

Starting An Open-ended Discussion for Cultivating Diverse Chatbot Applications is the key to raise public awareness of Conversational AI development.

At the end of this month, the COVID-19 Global Online Hackathon is announced as a promising event for international tech-solutions for both technical cooperation and self-rescuing. While a worse outcome of the corona-crisis would be protectionist policies for high-tech information sharing, we still look forward to the better result in which greater global coordination and transparency will win against all the odds.

Ready for a new normal in the chatbot industry? Read Rethink Chatbot during COVID-19 (2) — Go Beyond Chatbot for breakthroughs in chatbot industrial stagnant.