Chat Bots: The Good, the Bad and the Hype

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer!

Chat Bots is the new Big Data. As the saying goes, it's like sex when you're a teenager, everybody's is constantly talking about it but nobody is doing it. In the last 3 months, I've basically tried every single chat bot I've come across that seemed to have a good use case (from a consumer/user perspective), keeping in mind there's over 30000 bots on FB Messenger only and the numbers are growing by the day.

• The Good: There's something inherently attractive from turning a search or a form into a conversation. Conversational commerce might sound like a buzzword coming out from a poorly run brainstorming session but yes, you do want a little AI friend helping you find a pair of shoes, advising on the best times to book a flight, asking what your investment goals are and making suggestions, and outsource all the time-consuming search you do on a regular basis whether on search engines themselves or on websites and applications. Get me straight to the information I need little robot, please. For me, there's little doubt that will be a preferred form of search and discover for consumers in the future. The fact that Amazon sold millions of Amazon Echos/Alexa devices in a couple of years with little advertising and still fairly limited features ("What's the weather like?" and "Order new pair of socks" etc) shows the demand there's for this form factor.
• The Bad: Most "popular" bots I've tried so far are just glorified news feeds or web forms. Step outside of the prefilled form they want you to fill through a "conversation" and the party is over. Poncho, one of the most popular bots, initially created to deliver weather forecasts is actually fairly well built, except after a while you start thinking "How's this any different from a weather app with notifications?". They're even worse than an actual form or feed or app notification because the conversation seems forced and slow that it makes things more painful, if anything. As they create the expectation of a real world conversation, they frustrate the user by not delivering on the promise. Of course, you might have said the same thing about any new tech in its early days: Digital cameras that captured crappy pictures and quickly ran out of batteries, early search engines delivering completely irrelevant results, 56K internet connections that made you feel like opening an Encyclopedia if anything.
• The Hype:

The only live demo I've seen so far that has impressed me was from IBM Watson/The North Face. Here you have a use case that makes sense, an AI giving you context on what you're buying and showing you the right products for your needs. And a technology that does seem to be able a somewhat complex exchange in natural language.

If you want learn more about the numerous initiatives by tech giants on the AI/Chat bots topics, have a look at this excellent article:

If you want to test a couple of bots, try this list and follow the good people at VentureBeat:

https://venturebeat.com/2016/12/21/8-top-chatbots-of-2016/

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