About metabots, Slack, bots for groups…

Let me quote you:

Except instead of dozens or hundreds of generals contractors to choose from in a locality you’re stuck with three (Amazon, Google, Apple) that do 98% of the business and a very long tail of the rest.

what will be the future of mentioned big players metabots, is not clear to me; for final users and bot-service makers there pros and cons (both business and tech side) of these star-centric architectures, where any third party vertical chatbots will pass through them.

metabots could not be mandatory the above model, where any chatbot will be to be integrated with a (short?) list of hubs.

An interesting alternative is a peer-to peer (= chatbot-to-chatbot) NL-API (Natural-Language APIs) integration/negotiation.

I think automatized machine-to.machine among chatbots is an incoming area of research (again, both business and tech) and please note, again, I don’t call this artificial intelligence; that’s just a possible new way of application programming interface (open standard) for chatbots integration.

Slack fitting in that category? Do you see them creating a preferential program for bot partners like they’ve somewhat done with giphy and SalesForce?

Yes, in a way. I’m not too up to date on recent Slack business developments (If I’m not wrong they recently agreed some sort of partnership/relationship with IBM too).

For sure Slack have the big merit to have been probably the first company, in tempore non suspecto, that proposed a great and complete third party chatbots integration ecosystem. Slack is an amazing example of chatbots in/for (team-work) groups! And I feel that chatbots in group-chats is again a still unexplored interesting application area (but that’s another story).