![]() As 2017 rolls on, chatbots will approach their App Store moment. More people will start using chatbots for everything from having fun with friends to paying bills to ordering pizza to setting the thermostat at home. Incentivized to build and host better bots, platforms and developers will come up with new development tools, and bot features will get richer. Once payments become a normal part of the chatbot ecosystem, interesting things will start to happen much more quickly. Facebook is testing payments for Messenger chatbots as part of an invite-only beta, and others will no doubt soon follow suit. Today’s chat platforms have allowed developers to build bots and grow an audience - on Kik, for instance, Roll, DisOrDat, and Tickers the Bot have all reached a million users - but they’re only just starting to think about helping those developers make money. Its App Store was dominated by fart apps. At the same point in the history of mobile apps, Apple hadn’t even introduced in-app payments. In their current iteration, chatbots on Kik and Facebook Messenger have been around for less than a year. And sharing options like invites and mentions help bots spread virally.īut there are some key pieces yet to fall into place. Chat codes, like Kik Codes, and web bubbles (we call them “ wubbles”) are becoming standard. For instance, people are starting to understand that suggested responses - which allow people to tap an option rather than type a word - are better than a blank field for taking commands. ![]() As the ecosystem for chatbots grows, they will only get better.Īlready there have been some key advances. Hipmunk’s chatbot today might not provide as rich an experience as its mobile app, but that won’t be true forever. There’s no download, no account creation, and no learning curve. The entire process takes seconds instead of minutes. Then, because the interaction is just a conversation, you immediately know how to use it. With one tap, you give it permission to access your account. You can start chatting with it by scanning a code, typing in a username, or tapping a link. Having spent several minutes to reach that point, you then still have to learn how to use it - “ Where do I actually go to order the food again?” - all for an experience you may never even come back to.Ī chatbot, by contrast, is immediately accessible. First, you have to find the app you want then you wait for it to download and then you register your account. Using a mobile app for the first time is a pain. And they will get better and better, until they’re indistinguishable from native apps. They’re basic, but they have a fundamental friction advantage. “Chatbots have a fundamental friction advantage”Ĭhatbots today are where websites were in the mid-1990s. Today, they’re essentially indistinguishable from native PC apps and a lot more popular. They soon got media players, then movable modules, and, later, dynamic content through Ajax, HTML5, and a myriad of other new technologies. Tools like Joomla and WordPress came along to make it easier to build websites. So developers spent time working on websites, and browsers added functionality to support richer and richer experiences. Websites had a friction advantage over PC apps - you didn’t have to go to a store, find a CD, and bring it home to set it up on your PC. Here’s what the White House’s website looked like in 1994:īut then websites did something important: they got better. Yes, in the late 1990s, the Dotcom Boom got people overexcited, but in the internet’s earliest days, some commentators thought the whole thing would fail. Seeing this, many critics concluded the internet was good for research papers and not much else. In many cases, they were nothing more than blocks of text on patterned wallpapers. What happened in the early days of the internet showed how simple but low-friction solutions can surpass what came before them. We’ve been saying for a while now that chat is the new browser and bots are the new websites. If you pay attention to the lessons of history, this evolution would be no surprise. In some cases they may even be approaching the quality of mobile apps, which have enjoyed an eight-year head start. This generation of chatbots has only been around for about eight months, but in that short time they are already starting to surpass the mobile web. Facebook launched its chatbot platform in April - around the same time that we opened our Bot Shop. In an offhanded comment, Marcus noted that users could book airline tickets and hotels through Hipmunk’s new chatbot and that the experience was “pretty close to having a native app, and definitely better than mobile web.” Few people picked up on one of the most interesting things that David Marcus, head of Facebook Messenger, said at TechCrunch Disrupt in September.
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