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There’s been quite a fervor over voicebots lately, especially as we lead into next week’s MobileBeat 2017 conference on AI, messaging, and personalization. AI has taken center stage, seemingly nudging chatbots out of the limelight even though we all started using them last year.
There’s no nail in the coffin for Messenger bots quite yet (or those from Kik or others), but there is one colossal misunderstanding in the industry. The truth is, voicebots didn’t outshine chatbots because of the speech recognition features and ease of use — at least, not entirely. What really happened is that Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon overshadowed chatbots — and, by extension, took the attention away from Facebook Messenger and other texting tools.
The fundamental problem is that we want utility, not a trend. As an example: For a while, I used a chatbot to check the weather. It was called Poncho. It ran within one app on my phone — Facebook Messenger. But that one app is also part of the Facebook ecosystem. More importantly, it’s an app first, then a bot.
Somehow, the paradigm changed. The bots took one step forward and replaced apps on our phones. They also skipped the smartphone by using a speaker, like Amazon Echo or Google Home (and, soon, the radio in your car and other devices at work).
We prefer direct access to the weather, not an app running a bot. We realized an AI should provide first access, not a second or third layer back. It’s easier to understand if you think of the brand new user.
For someone who wants to find out about the weather, here are the steps in a chatbot paradigm. You buy a smartphone, activate the service, register…The post Voicebots didn’t outshine chatbots. Microsoft, Amazon, and others did appeared first on FeedBox.