Chatbots Taxonomy in 4 categories

Here some thoughts regarding Ted Livingston article: The Future of Chat Isn’t AI.

Ted Livingston, Kik CEO, during Kurt Wagner interview at #talkabot

I almost agree with your vision: chatbots are not necessarily “AI”-enabled monolitic assistants a la Messenger M, Amazon Alexa, etc.

I appreciated your beers “in-store” /offline shop example, because focused on micro-business proximity ecommerce (you mentioned a similar example in a previous post of yours). Joking with naming, I’d call these bots/instant messaging apps: #transactionalBots.

BTW, I’m convinced me too, about the big possibilities of that in-store/on-line ecommerce (you maybe call these kind of applications: online-to-offline); I just wrote my thoughts here (sorry in Italian language/about my country Italy…):

Cash-based e-Commerce for Local Trades ?Alcune mie riflessioni controcorrente sui sistemi di pagamento online ed una possibile via di crescita per l’e-commerce…medium.com

In general, I like Ben Eidelson’s messaging “landscape” analysis; see the architectural block diagram in his article:

The Messaging Landscape in 2016There’s a surge of excitement around messaging as a new platform and the idea of ‘Conversational Commerce’. There are a…medium.com

Generally speaking, me too I see some different cases in the bots apps landscapes:

1. Software-made “concierge bots”: I mean monolitic virtual assistants cmpletely software/alghorithmic (“intelligent”) human-like solver-of-all (Facebook Messnger M, Apple Siri, etc.)

2. Software-made business-specific “transactional bots”: in this case the bot is something similar to your beer-shop example: there is no need to any artificial intelligence here: very specific (business) context just need simplicity and user experience speed.

3. Just humans operators/experts behind the scenes of a instant messaging interface (Operator, some Zalando experiments, etc. etc.)

4. Blend of human experts and AI-experts services (maybe Ben is focused on this); Personally I think this “customer care” services approach very promising too.

What do you think about it ?
respect

giorgio