Messaging apps are already part of our day-to-day lives, and chatbots are probably going to be in the near future. How soon this will happen, and in which contexts they will be widely adopted, however, is still unknown.
Sometimes I get the feeling that chatbot developers (myself included) are overly optimistic about the suitability of chatbots to solve real problems and about the willingness of users to adopt such solutions. That is why I decided to run a small survey. My goal was to get at least a hint of how users perceive those new technologies. Here are the survey details:
Total number of respondents: 1,000
Demographics: 18–75, male and female. On the first four questions, the country of the respondents is outlined. For all other questions, the respondents live in the United States.
Methodology: Single-answer questions displayed online on Google properties and Google partners
Period: July 03 2017 to July 05 2017
My take on the results:
- The sample size is very small, so some of the data could be incorrectly representing the behavior and preference of users. (I am planning to run a larger survey in the future.)
- Most users have never used a chatbot before, and this fact influences their answers to most questions in the survey. That is, if they never used a chatbot to order food or to book a flight, for instance, they can’t know how good or how bad the experience is, so they are not going to pick that option out of the possible answers.
- Regardless of points 1 and 2, I think there is a clear trend toward using the “traditional way” of doing things. This means that we should not expect mainstream adoption of chatbots in the short term.
Daniel Scocco is a chatbot developer and the founder of Botware.com.br. You can read more about him on DanielScocco.com