Botscapes, Or: The Value of a Good Edit

“To write is human, to edit is divine”

- Stephen King

Most movie buffs have no problem rattling off the year’s Academy Award nominations for Best Picture. However, ask them to name just one movie nominated for Best Film Editing, and they struggle. But?—?perhaps surprisingly?—?these are two of the most highly correlated categories in the Academy Awards.

In fact, since 1981 not a single film has won Best Picture without having also been nominated for Best Film Editing. And, in roughly 66% of the cases, the film being nominated for Best Editing has gone on to win Best Picture. Obviously, great editing goes hand-in-hand with great film success.

The editor’s task is deciding what to keep, and what to cut, from a piece of work, decisions that may seem drastic or even violent, at least to its author.The word itself, “decision”, derived from the Latin cidere (“to cut away”), is related to the Latin suffix –cide (“a killing”).

Or to quote Stephen King again (from On Writing): “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

Reading down the list of the top 200 mobile apps underscores, in a different context, the power of great editing. The top apps?—?Snapchat, Messenger, Instagram, Pandora, Spotify, Uber?—?all provide delightful, frictionless user experiences. They are perfected, purposeful environments free of non-essential details, ornament, or functionality. And because these top 200 apps dominate 70% of all app usage, they form the de facto rulebook for success.A couple of brands, following this rulebook, are in the top 200?—?Chase, Starbucks, Walmart, Target, Bank of America.

But the vast majority of brands are not, and instead reside alongside the 1,499,800 other apps populating the purgatory of the lower 30%.

Help is coming, and it looks like a bot.

Bots are focused, purpose-driven pieces of software. Stripped of excess ornament or bloatware, “bots reduce friction to as close to zero as computing allows.They are an editor’s dream.

Bots may not be new?—?Google’s search algorithms have relied on bots (“spiders”) to index the web for years?—?but three recent and overlapping developments are thrusting them into the spotlight.

AI makes the jump from universities into products

AlphaGo’s victory over Korean Go champion Lee Se-dol two weeks ago not only captured world attention, it also sprung AI from the laboratory think-tank. The feasibility and commercialization of AI’s various sub-categories?—?natural language processing, computer vision, machine learning?—?is where a lot of companies justifiably spend their time, because this is where the obvious applications are (Amazon Echo, for example).

Bots are natural containers for much of this new functionality, because they are easy to make, work well in multiple environments, and don’t ask users to change current behaviors.

Messaging becomes a platform

Platforms arise where there is a massive consolidation of engaged users.

Developers, for their part, write software only for dominant or ascendant platforms and will ignore the rest (remember Symbian?) The only smartphone OS platforms that matter today are iOS and Android (in all its versions). Higher up the stack, the only apps that matter are the top 200 mentioned earlier, and within that rarified group, the apps that really, really matter?—?Messaging, Social, Music?—?eventually become platforms.

Bot stores become the new app stores

Bot ecosystems are growing up everywhere: Kik, Slack, and Telegram have them, Google is developing its own chatbots, and VCs are talking about theGreat Bot Rush of 2016.

The most important development in this area?—?particularly for brands?—?may happen three weeks from now at Facebook’s F8 on April 12. It is widely suspected that, during this event, Facebook will announce the creation of a Facebook Bot Store (or at least a robust developer SDK), making branded bot integration within Messenger easier than ever.

Ongoing questions

But will consumers prefer to use a brand’s native app, or the brand’s bot inside Messenger? Techcrunch’s rhetorical question seems to make the answer obvious: “When you can quickly and easily interact with Dominos, United Airlines and Capital One on Messenger, will you ever use their bloated native apps again?”

The evolution of messaging apps into giant, chat-based platforms, along with the simultaneous growth of bot ecosystems that serve them, will force brands to significantly question their current mobile strategies:

A. Focus on low-cost, high-quality bot integrations with major platforms, and bring my brand’s core value proposition to a large number of consumers in their preferred environment?

OR:

B. Continue to spend real money building and promoting stand-alone apps that will probably be ignored by most users?

In other words: to edit, or not to edit?

That really is the question.

William Payne

Technical Leader -- Machine Vision and Artificial Intelligence

8 年

I really do agree with the underlying truth: traditional advertising impressions are a lousy way to build deep and lasting relationships with consumers. The future of consumer engagement for brands has to be mediated by something akin to the concept of a bot. As impressive as recent demos are, I am far from convinced that the technology is ready yet -- but I am sure that it is just a matter of time. It seems to me that (despite the "deep" learning hype) the learning exhibited by this current generation of bots is decidedly shallow: in the sense that the connection between statistical n-gram-style machine learning and good-old-fashioned AI style relational logic and reasoning isn't particularly strong and/or working yet. I suspect that for meaningful communication to occur between a human and a bot, it is a fundamental requirement that both interlocutors share a common understanding of the world. Indeed, my interest in machine vision originates from my belief that vision provides the most direct and realistic channel through which can we build the sort of "naive physics" real-world models that could provide a foundation for the shared understanding required for meaningful conversation.

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