The "Chatbots" are coming...

Over the last year or so the term "chatbot" has been popping up with greater frequency in social media publications and conferences. This technology comes as a result of advances in artificial intelligence, the dramatic increase in consumer data, the growth of messaging apps and voice activate mobile devices.

What is a Chatbot?

Chatbots are little 3rd party programs that run inside a messaging app, like Facebook Messenger. They can do things like schedule a meeting, give you the weather and allow you to purchase a product, all withing the messaging app.

Channels like Facebook and WeChat are leading the way with their solutions. Not far behind are innovations taking place at Slack, Office 365, Kik, Telegram, Line, Google and Skype.

As the channel options grow more companies are rushing to offer services. Companies like CNN, RBS, Uber, Business Insider, HP, TechCrunch, Bank of America, The Weather Channel, Salesforce, Shopify, and the Wall Street Journal have all begun building bots within these messaging channels.

These chatbots accept typed commands but also leverage the native and voice-activated artificial intelligence capabilities of Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Facebook's M, and Google's new Allo tools.

WeChat is the current industry leader. However, most of us here in the USA don't know much about them because they are primarily a Chinese messaging app. They have been allowing bots to be built for some time and the Chinese love the little guys. WeChat bots allow you to add a credit card or connect a bank account, you can make in-store payments, you can transfer money to friends, you can split the bill with friends at a restaurant, you can hail a cab and pay for it, you can read the latest news, you can have your laundry picked up, you can pay your utility bills, and much more. The WeChat ecosystem is robust, lucrative, and growing. In fact, it is so successful that now most Chinese companies will set up their WeChat account before they set up their website.

It is not surprising that Facebook is trying to get in on the action with their announcement earlier in the year that they too would open their Messenger app API for developers to begin building their own bots. Google just last week announced their new "Allo" platform and Microsoft has been pushing their bot API.

Why is it important?

To me, this all feels a lot like what happened in the early days of smart phones and their respective app stores. Developers rushed to build apps that offered value to customers by increasing the usefulness of smart phones. Likewise, I believe a similar land rush to build the coolest bots has begun.

We are familiar with our phones being "smart" via the apps we have on them. Now our apps (Messenger) are getting smarter by the apps (bots) that are being created within them.

If I were an organization considering building a mobile application I'd also throw a bot idea or two out on the table. If you have a mobile-first audience that is on social media they are starting to run into these new little tools. I'd look at what is happening in WeChat for ideas to do the same on Facebook Messenger.

While building an app could be a great idea, building a bot within an enormous app like Messenger could be a backdoor, less expensive way, to gain access to a very large audience quickly.

Either way, I believe bots will continue to grow and I am excited to see what brands do. I'd love for someone to figure out how to improve email overload. Slack!? Build us a bot! Please!