Conversational or Web-embedded Bots ?
Hi Chris,
6/ THIS is what a WeChat transaction actually looks like (ordering McDonalds); not a chat but an app-within-an-app.
I‘m not too mutch fot the app-within-an-app model, successfull now with WeChat in China, Kik in Canada, and now with LINE in Japan
BTW, please note, many years ago japanese Docomo i-mode m-sites have been precursors of just that:
So, I feel that HTML5 embedded bot apps running inside a chat platform are a compromise of the moment; now in 2016 we are still in the visual web paradigma (click&point GUI), but we are maybe evolving in a final “pure” conversational dialog flow man-machine “intimate” experience (CUX).
SMS-based chatbots are, in my modest opinion, “past”, valid for a proof-of-concept, but without a possible future, almost in Europe. By example in my country, Italy, SMS are billed to final user something like 0.25 EUR eachone (?!) and by the way Whatsapp is used by 99% of italians just as a substitute of SMSs (I remind that Whatsapp forbid / ban (unauthorized, so any) chatbots sw…we will wait F8 event next weeks for updates).
And even Microsoft is getting in on the action, proclaiming that conversations + artificial intelligence will be their next big platform play.
I more agree on the above statement, and this is my exoteric previson: conversational applications will must be able to sustain complex conversations with users
- having an his own “personality” (someone call that boteness),
- having a deep/intimate knowledge of final human user (consumer in case of a #convcomm product/service), that means maintaing private user data (profiling, preferences, tastes, etc. etc.)
- having talent (?!) making inferences.
These will be third generation bots, while now, in the 2016 infancy of bots’ history, we are just slowly moving from generation I (command-based dumb) to generation II (dialog based, but without inference talents).
BTW, I’m convinced that chatbots on instant messaging platform (text based using hands to write on a keyboard) represent a temporary/intermediate phase, eventually bringing us to voice-enabled interfaces (e.g. Amazon Echo).
PCs -> mobile phones -> any voice-interfaced device
Eventually in future, talking AI-chatbots will imply a real natural language understanding and again:
Conversational bots will evolve intelligence (and afterward business advantages)
My two cents / with modesty.
giorgio