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I think it's because of the rapid adoption of Slack and WeChat, coupled with some desperation for there to be a "next big thing". We had a huge next big thing with mobile around 2009/2010, but everything since has sorta fizzled out. It was supposed to be the sharing economy in 2012, but Uber & AirBnB's great success hasn't really translated to other markets. It was gonna be Bitcoin in 2013, but then the bubble burst, mainstream users stopped caring, and it remains a niche technologist's playground. It was looking like it'd be hardware or IoT in 2014, but the big names there (eg. Nest) petered out without crossing the chasm. It was supposed to be wearables and the Apple Watch in 2015, and I do see some people wearing smartwatches, but again, it's really still an early adopter thing. Bots are up for 2016.

I'm beginning to believe Peter Thiel's quote of "Every moment in technology happens only once." When one company has great success, it doesn't mean that a whole sector will have great success; indeed, it's pretty likely that everyone else in that sector will fail spectacularly. But if that's true, the business model of many VCs (figure out the next big thing, and invest in the companies do it) is fundamentally flawed, and they should stick to providing working capital for businesses that have struck it lucky and already started to take off. But if that's the case, capital is a commodity, and it's awfully hard to justify 2 & 20.

Because our culture has shifted strongly away from the phone call. Turns out we prefer async comms for most things. Think about how many of the successful app startups were really just manifestations of replacing a phone call for a particular use case. Chat bots are the logical next step in this cultural shift, enabling people to communicate asynchronously to get more things done. No singular big tech change to point at, just tons and tons of incremental ones. The momentum behind chat bots is cultural, not technological IMHO. The mainstream is now primed for them. The phone app on my iPhone has been partially replaced by every other app on my home screen and entire categories of remaining use cases will be replaced by chat bots (customer service as an obvious example)... Dot ai.

Perhaps it's the growing user base of meta-bots/assistant agents/bots-as-a-platform-for-other-bots, whatever you want to call them, and a growing ability to have them coordinate and manage smaller "expert"/"skill" bots? Referring here to Cortana, Alexa, Siri, and Google Now/Ok Google, et al.

That sort of counts as a shiny new technology or at least a consumer shift, given the increasing ubiquity of these assistant agents today (every smartphone now has at least one installed by default and so does Windows 10 by default; the Echo has been a surprising sales hit for Amazon).

It certainly won't work well without direct, constant human intervention. Emergence isn't something multiple 3rd parties have ever done well, and I don't see a compelling argument for why it would work now.

I think what's compelling is that there is some sort of critical mass on the API side. We've tipped in the last year or two over to many (if not most) Internet things being accessible by API.

It doesn't seem surprising to me that companies are re-looking at matching up typing and text with these APIs, and coming up with some interesting use cases, especially with better NLP here in the last year.

I'm not doing anything bot related, but I think it's a (reasonably) exciting space right now.

There are many differences. Here's my take on it: http://cfenollosa.com/blog/bots-lack-metaphors-and-that-is-t...

- Tech is ready for realtime natural language processing

- Developers are getting bots right.

- Plenty of APIs to build task-focused assistants

- VC money

- Popular demand

The number of people using messaging apps (not sms) daily has skyrocketed in the last couple years, has it not? The shift is probably less recognizable because it's not a shift to messaging in general (text messaging represented that shift years ago), but a shift in platform from sms to messaging applications that innovators actually have some control over. Personally, i think it's a combination of that and the machine learning thing you mention. I'd wager that the amount of time the average person spends looking at/using a messaging app every day is very significant. Especially for something that has yet to be integrated very well or monetized.

I imagine Facebook, Google (and Amazon - make no doubt they're gunning for this) are tired of sharecropping on Apple's platform. They see Apple as an unnecessary gatekeeper.

iOS is still king for apps, but this move benefits the above players at the expense of Apple (Google seems very hungry to cannibalize the Play Store if it can make the bot store work).

Furthermore (specifically for Google and Amazon), if text-based bots can work out, they're both making a play for the Echo/Home market, bypassing smartphones devices entirely.

Because soon enough every company out there would want to include one in their website, regardless whether it’s based on some half assed AI. Depending on how good the implementation will be, bots could solve some real problems in the customer support front. And there would be top dollars in training bots (aka customizing the software) to adapt to specific needs. Instead of having FAQs, which no-one ever reads, you’ll have bots. And you could choose from a variety of them, starting from a few dozen bucks per month up to thousands.

There are hundreds of use cases I can think of. A doctor implements a bot on his/her site and it asks potential patients questions about their condition. It feels much more friendly than reading a FAQ. The same goes for a lawyer firm. Or how about a bank’s call center. Actually, every call center out there could be replaced by sophisticated bots. Or a bookstore that asks you to name a few of your favorite books and then makes recommendations. Come to think of it, the market here is huge. That’s why all the big players are moving in. Microsoft is already building APIs for their platforms.

As for Google, judging by the fact that they’ve invested shitloads of money in AI research, bots could really give them an opportunity to capitalize on that know-how.

Yea, there is of course a learning curve in AI.. a sort of uncanny valley of sorts, but bots have the potential to be used in any application where you would like to use humans. Their complexity and or realism is of course the deciding factor for where and how they can be used, but that will only get better with time.

Much of what we don't use people for these days is out of necessity. Microsoft can't afford to have a chat window on every Windows machine directly connected to a 1:1 support agent, but with bots, you can. Same goes for.. everything, heh.

Bots won't always be welcome on every page and piece of software, just like people won't always be welcome in every web page and piece of software - but there is definitely potential.

>A doctor implements a bot on his/her site and it asks potential patients questions about their condition

And the bot misdiagnoses or has a malfunction, leading to the patient not getting the correct treatment they required. Yikes.

> And the bot misdiagnoses

vs. a regular doctor doing that? Which happens all the time, actually. Its really interesting how we expect computers to be far more accurate than we ever expect humans to be!

Of course, I'm being a little disingenuous: You can sue a doctor, you can't sue a bot.

> You can sue a doctor, you can't sue a bot.

But you can sue the company that made the bot, and the company that employed it. With humans the employer can often dump responsibility on the "fall guy" who made the mistake, while with bots you often have to (properly) consider any failure as a system problem.

Messaging apps are old but perhaps it's messaging APIs of widely used platforms such as Slack that are new?

That's how it's pitched, but I'm not sure if I buy it. AIM had over 50% US marketshare and had a ton of bots almost 10 years ago, and tech-y messaging services have dominated Asia for years.

In the more recent years and in my environment it was first mostly MSN and later more and more Skype. Suddenly it switched to a lot of Facebook and later mostly Whatsapp.

None of these is bot friendly at all. Slack and Telegram have been a huge improvement for my daily automation needs.

Voice recognition has hit the tipping point, and smartphone penetration is up. If you're at a desktop computer then something like a concert ticket booking bot is pointless, because you can just go to the website and book them yourself. On a smartphone it makes much more sense.

>can someone tell me why entrepreneur/VC types are investing heavily in the ongoing submarine[0] that is 'bots'?

My guess is that the reward is being able to become the gatekeeper for what service gets to fulfill the customer's wish.

Trying to become that gatekeeper for search is a lost cause...Google has monopolized it.

So, the barrier to entry, while still high, is lower than search.

Amazon's echo, for example, gets to be a gatekeeper, without having to cut a deal with Google, or have Apple's iPhone in the way. Amazon fully controls who gets the business when you ask for a taxi to the airport.

Improved voice recognition maybe, also bots could be a benefit for handicapped HCI/accessibility. But mostly I think the popularity is just self fueled hype

Basically, it's an alternative to the "app store" model and the "web site" model that's more in tune with the social habits we've come to adopt. It remains to be seen exactly how the interfaces will look, what kind of "AI" etc, but text-based communication (CLI-like, but less difficult) with a "contact" is in many ways nicer than the other models of service interaction.

Bots seem as pointless today as twitter did 8 years ago. So, um... Yeah, I dunno.

Has twitter made back the money invested into it? Maybe we were correct to see it as pointless.

I'm guessing it's because the AI is advancing to the point where they can actually be useful.