Bots have always been sexy—but now they’re essential in a world where consumers spend all their time in messaging apps. Join the mastermind behind the world’s most successful bot and other industry leaders as they discuss why big players are turning to bots to remain relevant and boost bottom lines.
Eleven years ahead of Apple’s Siri, SmarterChild proved in 2000 that consumers were ready for bots. The mastermind behind the world’s most popular bot experiment so far, Robert Hoffer, notes that SmarterChild had 30 million users in its IM buddy list, and the hundreds of millions of messages it sent every day accounted for 5 percent of all IM traffic. Yet, it’s taken the last decade for the rest of the world to catch up.
What’s changed? Leaps forward in natural language processing, natural language understanding, and machine learning mean that bots today can reach levels of sophistication even HAL might approve of.
Plus, a convergence of three factors have brought us to a tipping point. We’ve seen broader platform support from powerful brands, the deep integration of NLP and NLU studies into computer science curriculums creating a generation of AI-focused developers, and the saturation of the app space — all of which mean that the time is ripe and the infrastructure is ready for a bot revolution. And, of course, underlying all is the ubiquity of text-based services and messaging.
“The scale of messaging itself is so enormous that it can’t be avoided,” says Hoffer. Smart businesses, he says, always need to go where the people are. “And they’re in messaging. According to every statistic, people are now more there than anywhere else,” he explains. “In fact, they use messaging on their phone more than they use the phone for what the phone is supposed to be — a phone. It’s the number-one application.”
The industry is sitting up and taking notice, says Hoffer, and major companies are making moves to own, control, or manage the messaging platforms themselves.
“Facebook realized it by buying large messaging applications and spending more than anybody had ever spent in corporate acquisitions in the history of corporate acquisitions,” Hoffer says, referring to Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014. He also points out the investments from other major players like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple, as well as relative newcomers like LINE and Kik.
And yet bot penetration in the B2B and B2C world is still fairly low, as companies ask themselves, ‘Do I really need a bot?’
“Do they need a website? Do they need an online presence at all?” asks Hoffer. “So the question becomes, where do you stop your online presence? If the world pushes your online presence [to bots], that’s where you go.”
“Every time there’s a new medium, marketers have to decide, ‘Do we need to be in this medium?’ And for a long time they decided no in respect to the web,” he adds. “So can companies afford to wait for other companies to get a foothold in the messaging platforms that represent collectively north of a billion people?”
Companies are only just starting to wrap their heads around how their strategies need to involve what Hoffer calls a conversational UI. “We’ve had graphical user interfaces, we’ve had natural user interfaces, now we have conversational user interfaces — CUIs,” he says. “Companies are just now beginning to understand that there’s a need for a conversational UI in which to maintain a dialog with their constituencies and their stakeholders via a messaging application.”
The companies that are furthest ahead in the game are the ones whose use cases translated most naturally, and simply, into the space — there’s no surprise that Domino’s can leap right into building simple conversational bots to have a pizza at your door after just a brief back-and-forth.
Companies that are having a greater struggle are the companies that either have a larger number of brands or a more nuanced brand message.
“So I think that it’s a nuance problem, it’s early in the game, and I think that companies have not yet fully formed their strategies on the best ways to handle it,” Hoffer says. “Most companies are considering this now, because they’re not blind to the opportunities presented to them by the enormous and pervasive nature of messaging in text platforms.”
But all those monkeys on all those typewriters, and we still haven’t seen a blockbuster bot?
“Nobody anticipated that we were going to see anything like Pokemon Go,” Hoffer says. “And yet –Pokémon Go. So do I think that there will be a Pokémon Go of bots that emerges soon from the noise? Absolutely. I don’t know which one it will be yet. But I’m like everybody else, making my table bets.”
Don’t miss out.
For more insight into how your bot could be the industry-disrupting blockbuster that proves the point, join our panel of industry leaders.
You’ll learn:
- Elements of a successful bot strategy
- Where consumers prefer to interact with bots
- In-depth discussion of B2C and B2B use cases for bots
Speakers include:
- Amir Shevat, Head of Developer Relations, Slack
- Robert Hoffer, “The Bot Father”
- Jon Cifuentes, Analyst, VentureBeat
Moderator:
- Rachael Brownell, VentureBeat