Photo Credit: ExchangeWire
When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, mobile apps shaped how we communicate and transact today. The vast majority of apps fall into two areas: communication and commerce (excluding media and games). Apps today pack lots of features, but building bots are the next evolution of mobile apps. Before bots, users searched for what they needed or often times, refreshed dashboards for updates, then clicked for a detailed drill down of results. This has become very cumbersome as users come to expect a lot on a tiny screen. An elegant approach to push notifications also needs to be addressed as we are inundated with all kinds of alerts and updates.
Drivers for Bot Evolution
Here are some components that make developing bots possible today.
Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages.
Data science employs techniques and theories drawn from many fields within the broad areas of mathematics, statistics, information science, and computer science, including signal processing, probability models, machine learning, statistical learning, data mining, database, data engineering, pattern recognition and learning, visualization, predictive analytics, uncertainty modeling, data warehousing, data compression, computer programming, artificial intelligence, and high performance computing.
In computer programming, an Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software and applications.
Conversational (user) interface agents attempt to personify the computer interface in the form of an animated person, robot, or other character (such as Microsoft’s Clippy the paperclip), and present interactions in a conversational form.
Source: Wikipedia
Communication Bots
For communication apps, great strides have been achieved with sharing content and connecting via text, voice and video. Adding Bots act as both a Customer Service agent as well as a Concierge Service. Both Onboarding and User Adoption are improved providing additional stickiness. FAQs, Instructions can feel more interactive, reducing overhead and increasing throughput. Slack Bots can be built within the enterprise to serve many functions of automating posting to groups, and provide alerts for activity that has been programmed. What this does is create a push strategy of highly filtered nuggets of information, instead of a pull effect whereby users retrieve dashboards, drill down reports, and reading raw log files.
The largest community of chat applications such as Facebook Messenger, WeChat and WhatApps are quickly adopting bots to encourage stickiness and augment these platforms beyond 1:1 or group chats to a more interactive and potentially transactional services.
Commerce Bots
Transacting commerce is exciting since this replaces the searching and in-person inquiry about so many things that people have in their mind. Supplanting the Yellow Pages with federated search such as Yelp and OpenTable that leads to say a restaurant reservation and ultimately commerce has matured to the point where even OpenTable is offering the ability to make payment via the service.
The idea is the continue to reduce the friction in commerce, leading to more efficiency, both for the customer and the merchant. The demo below from PingUp is a very basic commerce model that will certainly evolve over time. Integrating calendar, Yelp Favorites, or even prior credit card transactions, would enhance the relevancy and targeting, further reducing the friction.
Credit: Street Fight Mag
Conclusion
Our dependence on mobile apps grows and our expectations need to be met with smart and more efficient means to extract value and transact. While bots may not lend itself to all categories of mobile apps, communication and commerce application will gain further stickiness and loyalty when implemented. This might even be the slow death of the online shopping cart and websites.
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