Yesterday I participated in b2bots, a panel organized by gyro, a leading agency in the b2b space. There was a lot of excitement in the room about this space. Also, Esther (you may know her from EstherBot) put together a “botbrunch” last Sunday, where we discussed topics ranging from “are there more bot developers than bot users?” to how to assess the real value behind creating a chat bot. I was surprised to see Chris Messina there, also known as “the botfather” in Twitter ;).
From the tech innovation side, this week has been great. TechCrunch Disrupt was here in NYC, and pretty amazing products such Viv as went public (you haven’t seen the demo? Please do!). And on the other side, Google released an open source library to explain the functional role of each word in a given sentence. Ah! And just two hours ago Google released their messaging app, Allo, with some bot capabilities.
It’s good to remember that it wasn’t Facebook who invented chatbots. This article is a good analysis about WeChat, and it hints into the direction that the big players in the Western world may take.
Interesting points about some aspects of having a bot in your business that are not mentioned so often, such as the new tools, terminology, metrics, that they bring. I don’t particularly agree with the statement that bots will end up costing more than the equivalent human operators, though. But it still raises very valid points.
A well structured plan for designing, building, promoting and improving bots. There’s definitely a lot to be said for each of the 11 steps that the author breaks the lifecycle into.
The author argues that the expectations are currently too high compared to what the technology is able to provide, at least in the near future. For open-intent types of bots, I agree. However, we definitely have the technology to build bots that focus on one thing and get it done efficiently, such as scheduling, ordering goods, etc.
