If you’re not convinced about the future of Messaging, try this: go to the Messenger app in your phone and type 🏀 in a conversation. WeChat’s vision is slowly coming to the western world, and this is only the beginning.
Techcrunch released three articles just this week about chat bots. Also, they released a Telegram bot to read their posts. I would say it is a good move, even if it’s only to experiment and gain some insights. When the time comes, Forbes, Techcrunch and Quartz will know better than other publishers what to do with Messaging. Telegram is just their playground. They have also published an interesting audio conversation about bots.
Another interesting aspect of conversation apps is discoverability: invoking apps is not only super easy to do, but also trivial to mimic after you see your friend do it in your conversation. Facebook’s basketball game goes with 🏀, Domino’s is going after 🍕. There are 843 emojis left.
The chatbot industry remind me of the beginnings of the app revolution: users were very forgiving with design back then, in the same way that we’re now forgiving with bots that aren’t so smart. And they have a very strong cool factor. As this short article says, developing chatbots is actually pretty fun.
Talking about Domino’s. It takes your order via SMS, and then a robot delivers your pizzas to your home. This is a prototype that’s launching for neighborhood deliveries in some cities as early as six months from now, and probably doing on the roads for longer range deliveries in two years.
