In the last few months you might have read this multiple times, 'Why Chatbots are going to kill apps/websites in 2016/17' or 'Why Chatbots are the new apps' or something along the similar lines. This hype plus an explosion of bot builder platforms which let you build bots without writing any code have led to a surplus of annoying and stupid bots.
Its time to debunk the hype and get back to reality and customer experience basics. But don't get me wrong I am not against chatbots or conversational interfaces. On quite the contrary I am a huge believer in conversation as a platform and my startup Ozz aims to provide services to help make your bots/conversational apps smarter. I believe that conversational platforms are going to be huge in the coming years. This post however is not about my startup so let's get to the real issue.
Why not bots?
The aim of any company/service/software should be to be ease a customer pain point not to glorify some technology. Or in other words your customers don't really care if your service is a AI bot or a bot with cards or an app or a website. What they really care about is, is there problem solved.
And in some cases bots are not the right solution, let me try to give you some examples. I will name a popular app but the reasoning should apply to any app in the category
1) Uber (Cab booking in general)
I use uber on a regular basis and even though a bot for uber might seem pretty straightforward, I just send a message
Book me a cab
give my location and bam I have a cab. However there is a very important feature of uber I won't have anymore to see if there are cabs around before booking and track the cab on the map once it's booked. This might not seem very important to you, but it is to me and to a lot of other people or uber wouldn't have invested in it.
So how would I do this in a bot? Keep asking "Where is the cab?" or have it reported automatically every 5 mins. Both get very annoying very quickly.
How would you represent a ordered feed, keep sending me messages. Twitter/Facebook used to send and sometimes still send SMS notifications for birthdays, comments etc and its super annoying. Imagine getting a message anytime something is added to your feed.
3)Book My Show/Make My Trip (Movie/Flight Booking)
For some reason this category seems to be pretty famous and I might be wrong about this but the user experience on the app is way better than what it would be on a bot.
Let me show it actually
Booking movies
Step 1 ) Click on movies
Step 2) Choose movie from list
Notice how easily I can switch the dates to find show availability.
Step 3) Select seats
And thats it. That's 3 clicks. The bot alternative would be back and forth messaging, multiple times if you want to check tickets for different dates. It is a no brainer as which of the two provides a better experience. ( I didn't include any bot screenshots as I don't want to insult or hurt any developer's sentiments)
PS: I do not have any affiliation with Book My Show
4) Games
How do you make a bot for temple run? A HTML 5 webview based game in messenger doesn't count as a chatbot, sorry!
The Counter Argument
If you bring up these points there are a common set of counter arguments you will get. They are
1) People don't download apps anymore.
2) The UI of chatbots will evolve to provide more features.
So I will try to provide my arguments against both these points
1) People don't download apps
I would argue that is not entirely true, most of published research around it seems to only take into account the download numbers of top apps. But by being top apps that are widely adopted, there is going to be a slowdown/saturation at some point. This in no way is indicative of the entire app market as whole.
Also as smartphones keep getting better every year, memory and CPU are no longer a restriction.
The bottomline is if you are solving a real problem in a good enough way people will download your app. In fact apps have an advantage over bots as they are more discoverable than bots but that might change.
The challenge is to get users to click on download. But that is a call to action challenge which is pretty much platform independent.
There are cases where a bot is better than app but I will get to that later in the post.
2) The UI will evolve
I am sure the UI will evolve to provide more GUI options like lists, carousels, dropdowns, maps etc. But the more GUI you get into a bot the less it is a conversational bot and more it is an app. This very well might be the future. But you can't call these things chatbots just because they live inside messenger/telegram.
A better name would be messenger app/ telegram app
This might be the future messenger apps living in the messenger store. But apps not bots.
When are chatbots the better option?
That's too much negativity in one post, so lets talk about some positives, use cases where bots actually make sense.
1) One time use problems
If there are problems that aren't very frequent but big enough users might be better served by having a bot instead of apps. Some examples are
- Scanning QR code
- Getting Wifi info at public places
- Booking appointment with Doctor/Lawyer ( If you need them regularly you probably have a personal connection and don't use an app)
2) Customer Support
This is the most obvious case, but the NLP technology might not be ready for a fully automated service and a hybrid (human + AI) would be an ideal solution.
3) Human Replacement
In general the best bots are the ones which replace an actual human based role. So instead of conversing with a human you do so with a bot. Customer support is a subset of this. But in general anything like scheduling assistant, personal assistant etc.
4) Complex UI
I believe that this is the biggest opportunity for chatbots. Applications where the GUI is super complicated and you have to train people to use it.
A very good example I like to give for this is Photoshop. I have been wanting to learn to use photoshop I still don't. But imagine if I could just upload an image and tell photoshop through voice or text the changes I want and it does it. That would be super cool wouldn't it!
The hype is damaging the field and leading to people doubting the entire field. I hope in 2017 people start focussing on problems and solve real customer pain points and if the best way to solve it happens to be through a bot (there are lot of these, trust me), then by building a bot. It's going to be an exciting year, nevertheless.