Tech Special: Rise of the Chatbots

In our industry, it seems like every year is the year of *something* that we all need to pay attention to. So many things get touted as the trend-setting can’t-miss tech of the time (The year of mobile! The year of apps! The year of Snapchat!), and it’s hard to tell hits from hype.

I can’t tell you what year this will be, but I can tell you about the trend I love most: the rise of conversational interfaces. Often termed the Conversational User Interface (CUI), this paradigm emphasizes the use of voice and text over specific visual controls (in direct contrast to the traditional Graphical User Interface, or GUI), and often results in users having chats with their personal technology to acquire information, give commands, or interact with other devices and services.

While this isn’t a new technology or approach (I remember chatting with the AIM bot SmarterChild well over a decade ago), it’s certainly a promising new wave of ideas and applications. Many people first started to get comfortable with this generation of CUI-type interaction with Apple’s Siri and Google Now, and later Amazon’s Alexa. These voice interactions provide a ton of utility in daily use — creating reminders, adding to your shopping cart, finding a location on a map, and dictating text can all be really handy. However, speaking out loud to a device can be problematic in many scenarios (and may make you look slightly crazy), so we’ve now seen a huge spike in the adoption of text interfaces as well.

Most people have no idea what a CUI is, but a lot of them are starting to interact with bots on a regular basis. Services like WeChat have led the way in demonstrating what a messaging interface can do, by enabling users to interact with services and platforms in the same way (and in the same place) that they’d chat with friends. As [tech expert] Benedict Evans explains in his 'Messaging and Mobile Platforms' post, “You can send money, order a cab, book a restaurant or track and manage an ecommerce order, all within one social app. So, like the web, you don't need to install new apps to access these services, but, unlike the web, they can also use push and messaging and social to spread.”

This is a big shift from the every-brand-and-service-needs-its-own-app model that was all the rage a few years back, but it makes sense — adding and managing a ton of apps to your phone gets tiring, and they’re comparatively expensive for companies to make and maintain. It also means that companies can hook into the services people already have and use (social accounts, food and car applications, bank accounts, etc), rather than try to make everyone come to them. Users can focus on the information in front of them, and skip learning a new interface.

We’re still in the early days of this conversational interface world (especially in the west), but already some powerful applications and platforms are gaining traction. The messaging platform Slack has made a really fantastic use of their chat interface to enable a great bot ecosystem. Need to get details on project progress, start a video chat, or find a reaction gif? It’s easy to do, and it’s all integrated into the chat you’re having with your team. Global news publication Quartz launched a chat-style news app earlier this year, and I’ve found that I use it way more than I anticipated. And there’s so many more: the weight loss app Lark, the virtual assistant Clara, and let’s not forget all the SMS-based bots already in use.

The most promising recent announcements for me are the bot integrations for Facebook Messenger and iOS Messages, where both are opening up their platforms to outside developers and services (happening now and soon, respectively). That’s where a lot of my life happens, and where I think I’ll personally get the most usage and convenience. To paraphrase M.G Siegler [general partner at GV, formerly Google Ventures], while it’s already been happening in other parts of the world for a while, being able to order an Uber through your chat application is magical.

Bots are fun, and they’re highly useful for ask-and-receive, snack-sized transactions. And for the foreseeable future, there is a certain class of actions that make sense to do this way — simple transactions that can make good use of environmental details (my phone knows my location, time of day, and my credit card info, for example) to help get things done more easily.

And beyond that, the future possibilities are even more exciting, where we can easily imagine voice-and-chat-style interfaces for better service personalization (it could already know who you are and what your favorite song is), customer support (recent purchases and shipping preferences can be provided in-line), emergency response (relevant health concerns, location, and incident details could be sent for you) and more.

But to be clear, I’m not proposing that conversational interfaces will take over everything: using text or voice to navigate a rich visual process like taking and editing photos would be a nightmare. The need for great UX and UI design isn’t going anywhere. However, I believe we’ll see a rise in combination interfaces now: a traditional graphic interface with conversational (chat and voice) options alongside, letting users choose the right interaction paradigm for the task at hand.

So like all trends, we could all be wrong — in a year’s time, we may look back on this and say it was a fad. However, I believe this is an important movement, and one that’s going to stick around. In several a years' time, I think we’ll still be chatting about it — and likely having bots help us do so.