The Kik Bot Platform
avc.com
avc.com
Surely an UI with controls specific to the task at hand is much better than having the user guess what the bot responds to and what it can do?
In the restaurant use case, for instance, a QR code + text URL that points to a website where you can advertise the restaurant with whatever graphics and UI you want seems far better than some sort of text interface (which also requires them to be Kik users, know they can scan the code, etc.).
A well-designed and well-implemented UI is better, yes. But I think where this could be useful is for the many customers who don't have the cash to make a decent app. A stripped down chat interaction could end up more usable than what they'd build from scratch.
The challenge of syntax discoverability can be mitigated in a text interface with smart autocomplete to guide people towards what they can say. It becomes harder with voice. Also one messaging app, Telegram, allows chatbots to present customized keyboards that change based on the context of the conversation, e.g. thumbs up/down or star rating system.
http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/01/why-bots-not-a-i-are-the-f...
The usefulness of chat interfaces is proportional to how complex the task is and how poorly the user understands the scope and structure of the task.
To use a contrived example, if you have no idea what's left in your fridge, saying "Computer, restock all my essential groceries" is easier than going into the fridge, figuring out what you need, and ordering it via a traditional interface.
Or think of a customer service hotline, where the caller has no idea what options are even available to them, nor do they understand the hellish tree-structure of the touchtone menus. In these instances natural language interaction can remove the need to understand the structure of the task and get them directly to the thing they need. Many customer service lines are already doing this in a simplistic keyworded way, and they can be better.
On the other hand we're seeing a lot of people try to apply chat/natural language interfaces to tasks that are both simple and well understood by their users, and I think these will be doomed to fail. Ultimately voice/text is harder and more annoying for the user than punching buttons, the tradeoff being that they can be valuable when the task is complex/opaque. Most of these applications don't hit a positive tradeoff for the user - and end up being a complicated/annoyingly unstructured mode of interaction nobody wants to use more than once to show off to their friends.
Simple/well understood things like "call an Uber" I think will be pretty DOA if you try to shoehorn a chatbot into the middle - users will prefer the actual UI over it any day of the week.
I completely disagree when it comes to texting (voice is dif.). I have no interest in waiting for my uber app to load, get me a quote and than order me a ride... I would much rather use a chatbot to look up quick and easy things.
If it's a one off piece of information that I can ask in 1-2 queries/interactions with a bot...I would much rather that over opening an app. Especially, if I can look something up quickly without leaving the current UI i'm using.
I also think you are ignoring all the many use cases that are made possible that were never before possible (i.e. the ability for chatbots to augment humans to achieve access at scale), and the many business models that can shave off 20-30% of their labor costs with well executed chat bots.
I also think it's important to think about the bots calling other bots use case, which might become even more important. Just because you can't envision a human preferring a bot over an app with simple/well understood things...doesn't mean there wont be many use cases where a current bot you are using talks to other bots on your behalf, so the UI choice is never made by you. Finally, and most importantly, if chat bots start replacing parts of discovery, search and research, it will become crucially important to make sure your brands are found and used by bots and people over your competitors brands and bots.
Think of doing SEO in 2002. If you got it right, you banked tens of millions with minimal effort.
I can't predict the future, but viewing chat bots as a UI alternative limits its actual scope.
- Sorry, I didn't quite get that.
- I want you to restock.
- Sorry, I don't know how to "Youtube Rostock". Do you want me to google that?
- Well, it's... Uh...
- I don't know what you mean by "Whale that's a".
https://medium.com/@tedlivingston/the-future-of-chat-isn-t-a...
That's why this fascination with bots and conversational UIs seems particularly cyclical, as various chat rooms/chat apps come and go in popularity. Just the other day, I was pointing a colleague to The Jack Principles, a book/presentation/best practices compendium whose lineage traces back to the 90s (and I think now is a great time for Jellyvision to sell us all a new edition in bookstores).
The reason this is particularly exciting this time coming back around in the zeitgeist is that we have better tools than ever (NLP has come a long way, machine learning and deep learning are doing exciting things, the "platform" level concierge/assistants of Cortana, Siri, Alexa). Maybe this time it might be more than a passing novelty.
today, the problem with bots is that natural language AI is extremely difficult, so many criticisms hold true: websites and apps are better than bots for most tasks. today.
but that is similar to someone in 1994 saying that online shopping was worse than offline shopping. yes, it was. but technology improved to where online shopping -- for many cases, but not all -- became better than offline shopping.
the real question: if you believe AI will evolve to where chatting with a company bot is indistinguishable from chatting with the company's top human employee/representative -- e.g., imagine the equivalent of jeff bezos personally handling your amazon queries and transactions -- would a bot become the more natural interface for many activities?
http://www.slideshare.net/a16z/mobile-is-eating-the-world-20...
General/PA chat bot Me: What movies are playing tonight?
BOT: HBO has XYZ from 8PM to 10PM, UVW from 10PM to midnight. Starz has ABC from 7:30PM to 10:00PM, DEF from 10PM to 12:30AM
Me: No I mean what movies are playing in theaters tonight?
BOT: AMC at Location 1 near you is playing blah blah blah, Century Cinemas at Location 2 near you is playing blah blah blah, (lists off 3 other theaters with movie times)
Me: I want 2 tickets to blah blah at AMC tonight
BOT: Ticket price at AMC.com is $22. Reply with AMC to buy them. Ticket price at Fandango.com is $23. Reply with FAN to buy them.
ME: AMC
BOT: Here are your tickets. http://amc.com/tickets/23BDK532KDJF93434
BRAND CHAT BOT EXPERIENCE ME: What movies are playing tonight?
AMC BOT: At an AMC near you, ABC is playing at 7:30pm, DEF is playing at 7:00PM, GHI is playing at 8:30PM, ABC iMax is playing at 9:00PM
(I switch to the Century Cinemas bot)
ME: What movies are playing tonight?
CENTURY BOT: At a Century near you, XYZ is playing at 8:00PM, ABC is playing at 8:30PM, GHI is playing at 8:30PM
(I switch to another theater's chat bot)
ME: What movies are playing tonight?
BOT: Movie 1 is playing at 9PM, Movie 2 at 9:30PM, Movie 3 at 9:30PM .....
So in the end a general chat bot will be more user friendly than going to each individual brand's chat bot. That basically means developer's not associated with a brand will be building aggregate bots for specific verticals because building a general BOT that addresses any query is impractical for any single developer. Then what happens when multiple developers all target the same vertical? The BOT marketplace becomes littered with duplicates and becomes like the Android marketplace. So basically BOTS = APPS but with a chat interface and some rudimentary NLP rather than a UI.
More importantly though, the general bot would have to connect to all those APIs...however, if each theater has their own bot, than perhaps the general bot can query those bots without integrating with them. So, I guess the question becomes, are bots useful to other bots..if so, than everyone will need their own bot to be found by general bots.
I am not an engineer, so I don't know enough about integrating with APIs, but I would think a bot could use natural language to talk to another bot without integrating or even know about the other bot prior to the user needing it. Essentially, the user is talking to one bot that is finding and passing along the message to the other bot and vice versa.
Bot A > finds bot b > adds bot b as friend > asks bot b for a list of a commands > forwards bot b commands to user or interprets the users natural language in a way that maps to bot b's common commands> returns any results or errors and shares whatever relevant data, acting as middle man between user and bot b.
To me this sound simpler to create than a bot that needs to map to every APIs functions, etc... Even with a middleware tool...It still needs to hook into it. However, if those APIs have conversational interfaces, than users can interact with everything magically.
Maybe my lack of tech knowledge has me imagining a utopia that isn't technically feasible...but to me this sounds like a solution that can replace 30% or more of my web and app interactions completely and simplify another 20%.
Let's assume user selected Bot B to be added as friend for Bot A.
Bot A asks Bot B for a list of commands > This is essentially making an API call or Bot A sending a chat message to Bot B "Please send me all your public commands" (which is a simplified NLP API call)
However Bot B might not want to expose all its NLP command keywords (that is after all their Intellectual property) or it is too complex to send all commands because of myriad of ways an NLP query can be structured.
I like your idea of a conversational API. Maybe there is a better way to do that and definitely something worth thinking about.
Regarding the future of chat, the problem is these chat apps are trying to become task help apps. What is the purpose of chat/group chat? Communication, discussion, planning, sharing between "friends/contacts" (not between me and a bot) Communication with a friend or contact does not require a bot. Discussion with a friend, group of friends or contacts does not require a bot Sharing content with a friend, group of friends or contacts does not require a bot.
The only thing that requires a bot is planning an outing, trip, dinner, etc. with a friend or group of friends or contacts. For that I think it is better to have a general purpose bot. Here's how I envision that use case with a bot called JEEVES.
ME: Hey have you guys watched Zootopia yet?
FRIEND 1: Nah I want to but didn't have the time. I'm free tonight if you want to go.
FRIEND 2: Yeah count me in too
ME: JEEVES find us a movie theater close to us that's playing Zootopia tonight.
JEEVES: There are 3 theaters close to all of you that's playing Zootopia tonight. Theater 1 at (map)Location 1 is playing it at 9PM, Theater 2 at (map)Location 2 is playing it at 8:30PM, Theater 3 at (map)Location 3 is playing it at 10:PM
ME: you guys wanna get dinner before the movie?
FRIEND 1: Sure
FRIEND 2: Nah having dinner with GF's parents today.
ME: JEEVES find us some chinese restaurants near Theater 3.
so on and so on.
JEEVES can then book tickets, make a reservation, put the event on calendars, send restaurant location to just the 2 people who agreed to have dinner, etc.
See: http://nissan.com/
If you're serious, you don't. They operate in different domains and it doesn't make sense for kid.de to sue kik the chat company.
Trademarks do make sense (most of the time), and the application that the chat company tried to apply it to with the NPM packages was proper. Reviewing the emails (posted by the offended programmer) they even came off as pretty generous. They wanted a name, a name they'd had for a while, for a project they were releasing to the NPM platform. As others said, part of the problem is NPMs naming scheme. It doesn't allow (by convention or implementation) for sensible naming like with libraries in other languages (com.kik.bot.authentication, com.kik.bot.blah).
If you're generally opposed to trademark then I suppose you would want them to sue just to make a mess of things and eventually cause countries to get rid of it. But that's exactly why trademark law covers this issue already. Apple (computers) and Apple (music) were in different domains, consequently no problem. Once Apple (computers) got into music (via iTunes), Apple (music) had a case against them. It's also a bit more nuanced, down to locality as well.
http://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-npm
That being said, the content is solid and I read pretty much whatever Fred writes even though my focus is not on B2C.
1: International SMS isn't free (US-centric viewpoint, what's the situation in other countries?).
2: No character limit. Which is bypassed with MMS. Which introduces its own limitations when sharing media (reduced resolution/quality of video and images, for example).
3: Potentially, depending on the particular client, not tied to your phone number in a way that others can access (that is, as a fellow user you don't know that my number is 555-555-5555). This can be gotten around by using something like Google Voice, which then loses the MMS feature (have they added that in yet?).
4+: Probably other reasons that I can't think of at the moment.
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It just occurred to me that by "people" you meant the companies that kik is apparently courting with this. They'd want to use this because their users use kik. It's one more interface for customers to interact with them, on a moderately popular chat network.
I've never had a problem with SMS length as my phone splits messages into separate messages automatically.
SMS is free as hell in Canada and USA. I didn't realize the situation wasn't the same worldwide. Why is it not?
Other problems with SMS: Message order isn't guaranteed. Message delivery isn't guaranteed. You receive no notice what state a message is in (in transit, delivered, viewed). It's an unreliable medium tied directly to your phone (short using a service like Google Voice) and only to your phone (ok, less true these days, at least in the Apple ecosystem, where I can see and send SMS messages through my Mac if my phone is on the same wifi network). Still requires the presence of my phone in that last example.
These benefits may not be as great for someone who has a twitter or Facebook account, but as I don't, telegram is the easiest way for me to talk to all of my friends.