One week ago, I asked Facebook's Messenger to send me the weather forecast every morning. It has yet to do so.
Messenger is supposed to deliver me the weather through a free service called Poncho, one of the first "chat bots" to live inside Facebook’s messaging app behemoth. Instead of checking the weather through an app like Dark Sky or even Poncho’s own iPhone app, Poncho’s playful Messenger bot is designed to chat with me about the weather like a human being.
Except it's a really undependable, fake human.
Poncho’s bot has not only failed to send me the weather like I asked, but its bot has so far proven to be the most complicated method of getting the weather imaginable. And Messenger’s other chat bots aren’t any better.
Browsing for clothes to buy in Spring’s shopping bot is a bizarre, convoluted experience involving a multitude of finger taps that leaves me scratching my head, not wanting to pay $150 for a shirt. By the time I’m able to pay for a flower delivery through the 1-800 Flowers bot, I could have placed the same delivery over the phone twice.
Facebook and an increasing number of major tech companies think that these kinds of chat bots are the future of apps and how people will talk to businesses.
"We think that you should just be able to message a business in the same way you message a friend,” Mark Zuckerberg said onstage during Facebook’s developer conference last week. "You should get a quick response. And it shouldn’t take your full attention like a phone call would. And you shouldn’t have to install a new app.”
That’s a fine vision, but the reality is that Messsenger’s initial batch of chat bot partners feel half-baked at best and completely pointless at worst. They could make customer support better, help you quickly buy things, and complete menial tasks for you. But that’s going to take a mix of artificial intelligence and thoughtfulness that Messenger’s bots don’t have yet.
The promise of bots
The novelty of chat bots, or talking to companies like actual people, is the latest Big Idea to take Silicon Valley by storm. Companies like Microsoft and Slack, prominent investors, artificial intelligence experts, and countless startups are investing millions of dollars into creating bots and virtual assistants that imitate human interactions.
The gold rush mentality that exists around chat bots is because of an increasingly prevalent theory in the tech industry that normal people are experiencing “app fatigue.” So the theory goes: Our phones have become inundated with countless apps we don’t need and don’t have time for. Research has shown that people download zero new apps per month on average and regularly use only a small handful of apps, most of which are social networks like Facebook and Snapchat.
The promise of bots is that one app like Messenger can not only keep you in contact with friends, but also check the weather in the morning, manage your calendar, get you an Uber ride to work, order a burrito for lunch, and make a reservation for dinner.
There’s a precedent for this kind of behavior that Facebook clearly wants to tap into. WeChat, a messaging app with hundreds of millions of primarily Chinese users, has already pioneered this one-app-to-rule-them-all approach. People in China use WeChat to communicate with friends, send money to each other, pay rent, hail taxis, and much, much more.
Facebook knows that it can't experience WeChat's success overnight. Even if Messenger bots worked perfectly right now, it'll take time for people to realize why they’re useful.
"Some people are [not going to] be excited about a conversational UI at first," Peter Martinazzi, Messenger's director of product management at Facebook, told Tech Insider. "They’re going to be used to the way they do things. And I think for some of the use cases it’s not going to be something that someone does right away. It’s going to be an over-time kind of behavior."
Martinazzi thinks that travel and shopping services will make the most compelling kind of bots at first. Once of Messenger’s first bot partners is Expedia, although its bot didn’t appear to be functional in Messenger at press time. The app's first airline partner, KLM, lets passengers view their boarding passes, contact customer support, and receive updates to their itinerary in Messenger. Online retailer Everlane has offered customer support in Messenger for over a year, which includes update on deliveries and the ability to message human support reps about orders.
AI could unlock the true potential of chat bots
The main problem with Messenger bots and the bot landscape in general right now is a lack of artificial intelligence. It's the same reason Siri still isn't as smart as you'd probably like her to be.
Everlane, for example, offers great, responsive customer support in Messenger. I've used it several times to track or make changes to an order, and I always get a response within seconds. But Everlane relies on humans to offer its customer support, which is costly to scale for even a small fraction of Messenger’s 900 million user base.
AI could give a bot like Everlane's the intelligence of a human with the speed and cost efficiency of a computer. If a bot can learn about you and respond to your questions on the spot without needing pre-programmed answers that are written by humans, it becomes something closer to Iron Man’s J.A.R.V.I.S. AI assistant.
Facebook has been quietly building its own J.A.R.V.I.S. with M, a digital assistant in Messenger that’s currently available to a closed group of beta testers in California. M will eventually be able to complete all kinds of tasks on its own, but right now it relies on a human team to help it field requests and fill in the cracks where AI falls short.
When M is eventually available to Messenger users around the world, it could facilitate interactions with other bots like an AI overlord. Messenger product manager Seth Rosenberg suggested as much during a session on building bots at Facebook's developer conference last week, although he declined to go into specifics.
Facebook is letting Messenger bots tap into the same AI tech that powers M so that other bots can understand natural language on the fly, remember things about you, and hold a conversation with you like a human can. Its initial bot partners didn't have access to that AI before everyone else, which could have to do with why they're so underwhelming.
It’s these potential AI advancements, especially the possibility of M facilitating how bots interact, that could usher Messenger’s bots into the mainstream. But right now the few bots already out are difficult to find and significantly dumber than the apps we already use.
Messenger bots are too young to call a fad at this point, but until they grow up I’ll continue to get the weather elsewhere.
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