(2018-04-16) Chatbots What Happened

Chatbots: What Happened?

Remember chatbots, the Next Big Thing of 2016?

This was exciting — enough so that I joined Facebook as design manager for the Messenger bot platform

There were legitimate reasons to get excited back then:

So why didn’t it happen?

Platforms are hard.

So should Slack, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Kik, and others have built their own built-in bots to lead the way? Should they have gotten more proactive with their bot funds and incubators, hiring mentors to educate participants in the Way of the Bot, or supplying engineering and design resources? Funded Strategic Bot Initiatives at high-profile partners? In my opinion yes, yes, and yes.

Bots weren’t really going to replace apps, any more than apps replaced the web.

Text is hard.

the US-based messaging platforms have added GUI features: Slack’s popup dialogs, Microsoft’s rich cards, Facebook’s structured templates and web-view overlay. Yet the overall, chat-centric narrative hasn’t changed.

Some of the most innovative bot experiences aren’t actually bots:

Just acquired by Credit Karma, Penny is a competitor to Mint with messaging front and center. It provides chatty advice and alerts, but also an account dashboard and transaction list.

Subscription clothing service Trunk Club (acquired by Nordstrom in 2014) has an app that mixes chat and GUI in two ways:

Much of this functionality is powered by Layer, a company with its own twist on messaging platforms. Rather than entice developers into their app, Layer provides them with tools and services to build messaging experiences on their own.

*Launched in 2016, Foursquare’s Marsbot provides food and drink recommendations via chat. It takes requests but also recommends proactively, building on Foursquare’s ability to accurately detect not just what block you’re on, but in which restaurant you’ve just sat down.

Marsbot operates over SMS (and thus could work over any messaging platform). But none of today’s platforms provides access to background location, so Marsbot requires users to install an app. It sits in the background and does its thing, while all user interactions occur over SMS*

Predictions

Messaging platforms will remain niche

Messaging experiences will continue to grow

Businesses will message more