Bot Hype: What to expect in 2016

With the burst of AI (artificial intelligence) technologies and growing messaging ecosystem there is a trending belief that the future of apps lies in conversation. Despite the current trending #ConvComm hashtag and @chrismessin article, I believe we are seeing an emergence of something more important than just a conversational user interface.

We are very far from a truly intelligent conversation interfaces for many reasons. If you look at the most conversation based messenger apps like Magic, Facebook M and others - they are all human assisted and they will stay like that for a while until we figure out a way to transition AI from delayed model training to real time learning, which will lead us to cracking the code of how people learn. The basis for this is described by “Moravec’s paradox”.

The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard.

The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted — recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question — in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived… As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.

© Language Instinct

Not all applications should be conversation based, can Dropbox by itself be transformed into conversation bot? I don’t believe so, but Dropbox may have a bot, the one that you can program to interact with your files, photos and/or shared folder members.

Interfaces

There will be a major paradigm shift in how people interact with services and bots will be tied in with the each stage of this interaction, starting from the initial contact to the selling and shipping process. Bots will be the interface itself, highly configurable and proactive; think of existing API’s with a reasoning components built-in.

is very hard to predict the taxonomy of bots right now but if we dive deep into the history of how APIs and SDKs evolved we can somewhat see patterns for future types of bots and what they will do.

Finders

Bots that digest huge amounts of data and are able to extract relevant information in a matter of seconds. We’ve already seen that and the only company that is truly capable of delivering on promise is Google. Though there will be many more local finders that will operate in the personal space such as Findo.

Movers

The ones that deliver your email to slack channels already or the ones that will probably handle your next Amazon delivery. Basically, most of Slack integrations/apps that transfer data from one source to another fall into this category.

Notifiers

Intelligent scrapers that will let us know when the new “House of Cards” episode is out. There are a lot of companies in this space right now, ranging from SaaS for competitor intelligence to consumer apps such as Facebook Notify.

Populators

The most complicated part of conversational apps is an automated sequential data input that may or may not require natural language processing. Most probably will make a strong use within the SaaS space.

Enhancers

Something that gets very little attention nowadays but I believe is a huge game changer of the way in how people will work in the next 5–10 years.

All of our mundane tasks and routines can be improved by a data enrichment. Think of a designer having a task to design a landing page for a car dealership. It will be a time saver to pull up top car dealership sites in the context and top tips for designing a landing page, along with some of the top rated landing page designs from Dribbble.

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