Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg detailed how Facebook aims to reach the planet's 7 billion people — half of whom do not have Internet access. He’s going to have them do that on the Messenger platform using chatbots. Chatbots are chat robots — interactive software powered by artificial intelligence often with an assist from humans — that are designed to simulate human conversation. They are popping up on messaging services where you can use them to perform simple tasks.
While they are not yet common in the U.S. and Europe, Chatbots have taken off in Asia, where messaging services such as WeChat help users schedule doctor's appointments, shop for the latest styles, play games or the lottery and send money to friends. If successful, Facebook could effectively leapfrog the app economy, and create its own thriving digital ecosystem where users can communicate with automated representatives for brands and businesses within Facebook's platforms.
Echo Microsoft
Microsoft’s CEO, the stylish and analytical Satya Nadella, also preached the power of bots at his developer conference, Build. And not just any bots — bots powered by artificial intelligence that can carry meaningful conversations and handle tasks for you.
“It's about taking the power of human language and applying it more pervasively to all of our computing," Nadella said in his cerebral introduction to Microsoft's annual developers conference. "By doing so, we think this can have as profound an impact as the previous platform shifts have had, whether it be GUI [graphical user interface], or the web, or touch, or mobile.”
There will be bots, he said. Bots for ordering you a pizza and calling a cab and booking flight tickets and communicating with you on Skype. “People to people. People to your personal digital assistant. People to bots. Even people to your personal assistant calling on your bots on your behalf," Nadella said in a statement so bizarre even we couldn't have made it up. "That's the world you are going to see in years to come.”
But it took more than an hour for Nadella to acknowledge the elephant bot in the room. Microsoft's wild child: Tay. Just days before Microsoft's biggest event of the year, the company proudly announced Tay, a spunky, experimental AI-powered Twitter bot to chat up millennials. It could have shown off the power of bots to carry on entertaining conversations. Instead, Tay turned into a foul-mouthed bigot, spewing racial slurs after being trolled by Twitter users and had to be taken down. Then, just hours before Nadella took the stage, Microsoft accidentally re-activated Tay only to quickly pull it again after the bot started bragging about smoking weed. “We want to build technology so that it gets the best of technology, not the worst,” Nadella said on stage later. “Just last week, when we launched our incubation Tay... we quickly realized it was not up to this mark.”
Everyone Else
Because their focus is app-based, the other technology companies (including Microsoft) have built a single, AI-based digital assistant that works from the user’s side. These include Siri from Apple, Cortana from Microsoft, Echo from Amazon and Google Now from Google.
The Chatbot revolution, however, is driven from the other side of the communication channel. The airline will have a bot for you to make your reservations. The Home Depot bot will talk you through how to use a tool you purchased or help you with a return and refund. Companies such as Lyft, Uber and KLM are already working with Facebook to use bots for their customers.
The Next Big Thing
Chatbots are definitely being hyped up, but at the same time they could radically change the way we use our phones and computers. That’s because Chatbots unlock “conversation as a platform,” as Microsoft’s Nadella puts it. We've trained ourselves to click through apps or search in weird phrases to get the information we want. You wake up thinking “I wonder if it will rain today” and instead you have to open an app and search with your zip code to see if it's raining.
Chatbots could change everything about how you surf the web. In the future, you could just say “I wonder if it will rain today” and a Chatbot would know your location and be able to answer conversationally whether you should bring an umbrella. No apps. No search box.
Rick Richardson, CPA, CITP, CGMA received two AICPA lifetime achievement awards for his contributions to the profession in the field of technology. Providing his annual forecast of future technology trends, Richardson is the keynote speaker at the New Jersey, California and Illinois conferences each year presented by Flagg Management. www.flaggmgmt.com. If you have 20 minutes each week and want to keep current with today’s technology, subscribe to Rick’s newsletter, TechnologyThisWeek.net.
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