Apps are taking a back seat in 2016 as chat bots are turning out to be all the rage. After M and the Uber chat bot, Facebook is now reportedly giving some developers access to an unannounced Chat SDK that allows them to build interactive experiences and bots in Messenger for shopping, booking travel, and more.
However, this new AI will be different from M, which can already do a lot that these bots could do, as the idea with the chat bots is to allow Facebook’s partner developers to build their own bots that users could chat with inside of message threads to complete tasks.
The concept of lightweight chat-based interfaces was popularised by apps like China’s WeChat and Japan’s Line. Rather than forcing people to download entire apps for each business or use case, they can simply send messages to official accounts, without having to friend or like them, or chat bots inside the instant messaging app. It also helps businesses escape the mess of having to build, popularise and maintain whole mobile apps for multiple phone operating systems in a sea of apps flooding the app stores and gives them the easier option of interacting with their clients by simply messaging them.
Assist appears to be one of the bots built on the Messenger Chat SDK that claims to offer interactive bot functionality on Messenger. The chat bot that simulates virtual conversations between Miss Piggy of Muppet and her fans through Facebook messenger is another.
After M and the Uber chat bot, Facebook is now reportedly giving some developers access to an unannounced Chat SDK that allows them to build interactive experiences and bots in Messenger for shopping, booking travel, and more.
On the web, keyword search was the core of the experience. But on mobile, people spend most of their time on chat. So if Facebook wins the messaging war and starts controlling chats, it also gains control of the portal to commerce and content as well as communication. Mark Zuckerberg’s 2016 challenge to himself to build an artificial intelligence assistant to run his house like Iron Man’s Jarvis suddenly looks less like a lazy dad strategy for hack parenting and more like a plan to take over the world; or at least a good chunk of the virtual world (insert maniacal laughter here).
