WhatsApp just surpassed 1 billion monthly active users, Line is building their own version of Facebook M, and the New York Times has released a Slack bot.
As messaging apps turn into platforms, bots have disruptive potential. One of their advantages with respect to apps (their competitor, if you will) is that they can operate on your phone, your TV, third-party communication apps, and even on land lines - over voice, text and media content.
Xiaoice, the chat bot developed by Microsoft, is exchanging an average of 23 messages per conversation with humans. After 6 billion message exchanges, it’s clear that many people don’t care that they are chatting with a machine. Many of these conversations are private and often quite personal.
Essay about how mobile messaging could become the prevalent social and business interaction model, after “Mobile ate the world” and “Messaging beat Social”. It studies WeChat’s MaaP (Messaging as a Platform) model, the rise of chat bots in the trendiest MaaP in the business world, Slack, and conjectures about an upcoming mother brain of all chat bots from Google.
The NYT Election Bot sends live updates and accepts questions from readers about the upcoming elections. Slack is probably not the best platform for this. Telegram could be, and Facebook Messenger definitely will be.
Artificially intelligent bots are exciting but, let’s be honest, they fall short of the promise of “intelligence”. This practical article explains some ways how we can bridge the gap while we develop truly sophisticated artificial intelligence.
Line, the strongest messaging app in Japan, seems to be preparing a launch of a concierge service in Thailand. Line already provides many services on top of chat, such as payments and on-demand taxis, so we should keep an eye on how it evolves.
Flow XO provides a bot to build these workflows. Definitely analogous to Workbot, and also not far at all from what you can do with Zapier with what they call a multi-step zap.
