Chris Messina: Bots are teaching computers how we talk

If you’re of a certain age, then it’s likely that the first time you communicated with a computer was by typing very simple commands, a specific keyword, or a one-word search query.  And if you talked to a computer, you spoke very slowly, carefully enunciating each mono-syllabic word as loud as you could — the voice you now reserve for that weekly long-distance call to your retired father-in-law.

Now consider what you can do today: type full sentence search queries into Google and ask Alexa to tell you a Donald Trump joke (she will). It’s a shift that’s been decades in the making.

Speaking at the Botcamp Summit, Chris Messina, developer experience lead at Uber, and John Borthwick, CEO of Betaworks, discussed the ways bots are enabling computers to listen to humans as they usually communicate — instead of humans altering their communication style to talk to computers. “It’s about humanizing the technology and allowing people to lean less toward the computer and make themselves more computer acceptable and having computers and technology lean towards the person and meeting people where they are,” Messina said.

Messina and Borthwick also talked about the discovery challenges for bots, and how enterprise bots have an advantage compared to those found on chat platforms. “Slack and enterprise bots are taking hold because the discovery problem gets taken care of in a work setting. The problem gets solved socially, but only when people share” the bots, Messina said.

When asked by an audience member whether Facebook was purposefully making discovery hard because it may want developers to eventually have to pay to promote their bots, Messina cautioned against drawing such a conclusion. “It’s too soon to tell,” Messina said. “Long term, yes, Facebook wants you to pay to access that audience. But they don’t know yet what exactly the best use cases are. So before going super hard and putting [ads and bots] out in front of a lot of users” they’re going to wait to see what people want, he said.

In their 30-minute conversation, Messina and Borthwick touched on a range of subjects, including the enormous potential for Apple’s iMessage platform, an unworthy comparison of bots as verticalized search experiences, the growing importance of voice interface, and the notion, according to Messina, that cars are becoming “large phones on wheels.” You can watch the full video above.