I know what you’re thinking, ‘I already talk to a robot on a daily basis, it’s called my boss’. Unfortunately for you, it doesn’t look like you’ll be waving goodbye to that fleshy bundle of joy in favour of a metallic alternative anytime soon. It does however seem like we’ll soon have the ability to create unique artificial intelligence without needing to know a thing about coding, so what’s going on?
Rather recently, Facebook announced that the ‘next big thing’ would be bots within its Messenger app. The idea is to allow the user to do everything within one app – because minimising an app and opening a new one just takes far too much time.
Eventually, your all-in-one-app-bot will become a replacement for your real friends, who needs them when you can talk to something capable of doing just about everything?
Perhaps you want to ask the Barclays-bot to check your balance, or request a pizza delivery from Dominos-bot, the idea is to keep you within the Messenger app as much as possible, why bother using up phone memory on pointless apps, just stick to Facebook!
It’s not just a one-way relationship either, your news-bot could start a conversation asking if you’d like to know the latest gossip or the most recent tax dodger.
Initially, your exchanges will be structured, with Messenger bots prompting you to ask or do certain things. This will develop over time to eventually reach natural conversation and leave you forging emotional commitments with your individual AI. Needless to say, this could completely revolutionise the app world and our smartphones in general.
Imagine for a moment that bots take off and end up being well received by the public; Messenger becomes the go-to app for just about everything. Smartphone developers will recognise consumers are moving away from apps and we could even see Siri and Cortana expand even further to offer app services within the already impressive assistants.
How does it work?
Effectively, Facebook will be granting external companies the access and knowledge on how to make ‘stuff’ within the Messenger app, the technical term for this is an application programming interface (API). The first API to come from Facebook allowed developers to create apps on the main Facebook app, which spawned multi-million pound companies such as Zynga, the creators of Farmville.
You don’t need to be a genius to recognise these bots have to potential to make someone a lot of money, app developers will have a whole new system to learn and ‘bot developer’ could become a fully-fledged career.
Once a bot has been created, it will be powered by Facebook’s Bot Engine, and ‘should’ get smarter as it engages in more human interaction.
Undoubtedly, this latest announcement further exemplifies why Facebook Messenger got its own spinoff show back in 2014. Back then, fury swept the world as teenagers everywhere announced they’d be boycotting the social media platform in pure disgust – that ended well, didn’t it? Now, it’s likely we’ll see something similar.
The problems
Anyone remember Tay, the neo-Nazi, racist and abusive chatbot by Microsoft that had to be shut down within 24 hours in March? Clearly, this will be in the back of the minds of everyone behind Facebook bots, just don’t be too surprised if screenshots of personal bots appear online once the project properly takes off.
Then comes the likely reluctance of the regular consumer wanting to talk to a robot that’s trying to act as if it were a human; you only have to look at automated telemarketing phone calls, most people will just put the phone down and won’t bother.
There’s also the fact consumers may view these bots as an invasive way to sell their products to them – after all, people are mostly using Messenger to talk with friends and colleagues, not to be sold products. This will be made worse as Facebook have also allowed businesses to contact people through Messenger if they already have your mobile phone number.
Furthermore, one of the biggest problems will be security – if you’ve got information stored within your Facebook bot, if a hacker were to access your account, they would have an array of information and personal history that could have devastating consequences; this is something Facebook do not believe will be a problem.
“The reality is when you think about the number of people who are on the Facebook platform, and how well protected their account is compared to general practice around the world, we feel good that we have best-in-class protections that will protect those accounts better than most companies at a smaller scale can.” Facebook’s head of messaging David Marcus told the BBC.
As with everything, there be teething problems, but it seems Facebook are confident bots will prevail in the end.
The good stuff
Bots are sure to open up a new dimension for advertisers, we will likely see new companies and campaigns spouting all over the place; information will be even easier to access and locating one of the 87 apps on your smartphone could soon become history.
The potential for bots is huge, they will add new elements to business and social media strategies across the board, there will be more potential investment opportunities and a platform to contact with new audiences – the best thing is none of this should come as too much of a surprise either.
The natural progression from something already simplistic such as apps, is to follow in the footsteps and aim to streamline the idea entirely, which is where we come to bots. Apple, Microsoft and Google are all experimenting with the technology, so it’s safe to say this is only the beginning.
Apps may be fading away, but it seems we’ll soon be getting a new best mate to help us drown our sorrows…
