Chatbots don’t live up to their promise
The age-old hype cycle has familiarly unfolded when it comes to chatbots. Dubbed another “next big thing”, our hopes were high.
All the signs pointed towards success: messaging was huge, and conversational marketing was hot, but what happened?
At the 2017 Mobile World Congress, chatbots headlined.
The organisers cited an “overwhelming acceptance at the event of the inevitable shift of focus for brands and corporates to chatbots”.
And the only significant question was around who would monopolise the field.
It should have been “will chatbots take off?”
Digit’s Ethan Bloch sums up today’s general consensus: “I’m not sure we can say chatbots are dead, because I don’t even know if they were ever alive.”
Dave Feldman, vice-president of product design at Heap, said chatbots did not just take on one difficult problem and fail – they took on several and failed all of them.
Here is where I think we’re going wrong:
Bots versus apps
You cannot pit two different technologies against each other when they serve different purposes.
In my opinion, a new product/service needs to be two of the following: better, cheaper or quicker.
Are chatbots cheaper or quicker than apps? Not yet!
Are they better? That’s subjective, but it’s fair to say that today’s best bot is nowhere close to today’s best app.
Bots for the sake of it
Sometimes bots just are not the solution. The past two years have seen bots applied to problems where they aren’t needed.
Building a bot for the sake of it – letting a bot loose and hoping for the best doesn’t work.
Remember, a bot that does one thing well is infinitely more helpful than a bot that does multiple things badly.
Inaccessibility
Despite the hype around artificial intelligence (AI), we’re a long way from achieving anything human-like.
In an ideal world, natural language processing (NLP) allows a chatbot to understand messages it receives.
But the tech is in its infancy. Siri understands your words, but not their meaning.
Don’t dismiss GUI
There is a reason computing moved from text to graphical user interfaces (GUIs).
Using clicks to input is easier and faster than typing, even with predictive (errorprone) text.
When it comes to output, the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” is right.
There are concepts that we can only express through language, but most tasks can be carried out more efficiently and intuitively with GUIs than conversational user interfaces.
Humans like talking to humans
Human conversation encompasses more than just text, it includes reading between the lines and leveraging contextual information, and Facebook’s goal is to have bots pass the Turing Test, meaning users can’t tell whether they’re talking to a bot or human.
Bots provide a scalable way to interact oneon-one with the consumer.
Yet, they fail when they don’t deliver an experience as efficient and delightful as the complex, multi-layered conversations we’re accustomed to.
Where do we go from here?
For now, bots can continue to help us with automated, repetitive, low-level tasks and queries.
And as messaging gains traction, NLP/AI becomes more sophisticated and developers continue to experiment with apps and platforms, technology will continue to grow and I can’t wait to see what happens next.