Chatbots Take Over The Shop
Looking for fashion advice? Consider asking a robot.
Spring, a mobile shopping start-up, offers a program that will answer a message sent through Facebook’s chat client. The robot helps users find apparel that’s right for them. It will ask for a price range and then suggest items it thinks a user will like. Not quite the right style? The program will suggest some different options.
Spring is just one of several companies moving into the chatbot market with the support of big tech companies. At its annual developer conference this month, Facebook unveiled a new way to write code that enables any company to build a bot capable of interacting with people through its Messenger chat program, The Times reported.
Microsoft has also revealed a tool that allows developers to create bots for Windows 10. “We want to build intelligence that augments human abilities and experiences,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said at its developer conference in March.
More than 1.6 billion people are projected to become users of messaging apps by the end of the year, according to eMarketer, a research firm. With that in mind, brands are looking for ways to talk with, instead of at, consumers. “We’re conversational creatures,” David A. Marcus, vice president of messaging at Facebook, told The Times. “That’s the way our brain functions. That’s the way we’re wired. As a result, it’s probably the most natural interface there is.”
As marketers become more personal, not all users are enthusiastic.
“Should brands insert themselves into one of the most personal activities online?” The Times’s Robert D. Hof asked. “Who wants ads from Pampers cluttering their most intimate chats with friends?”
The shoe brand Clarks created three virtual characters to promote its popular Desert Boot, allowing users to connect to them on WhatsApp, a popular messaging service, and receive messages, videos and playlists.
Focus Features, a film division of NBCUniversal, went even further. It hired an interactive marketing start-up to create a chatbot version of Quinn Brenner, the main character in “Insidious: Chapter 3,” to promote the film’s release. People could use the chat application Kik to converse with the bot and, over the course of a few days, some 350,000 people exchanged an average of 69 messages with it, The Times reported.
Kik, which has more than 275 million users, has introduced a “bot store” that features bots from companies like the clothing retailer H&M, which offers to be your stylist, and the cosmetics company Sephora, which offers skin care and makeup tips.
“Imagine if you had, say, 10 bot interactions a day, and if your entire daily commercial life was powered by a chat platform,” Ted Livingston, chief executive of Kik, told The Times. “How that platform works — and who controls it — is going to be very important.”
There are skeptics about how far this will go. “A lot of apps are already incredibly functional,” Robin Chan, of Operator, a small e- commerce startup, told The Times. “Take Uber, for example: You just push a button and it works. You don’t need a drawn- out conversation for every single app.”