Facebook bets on chatbot resurgence

To browse for a pair of brown loafers on Facebook Messenger, you can now text a message to the service to begin a conversation with the mobile shopping startup Spring. Spring will ask you for a preferred price range for the shoes and show a smattering of what it thinks you might like. If the selection elicits yawns, Spring will try some different options.

The experience is akin to chatting with a friend, “the one whose taste you always trust while you’re shopping,” said Alan Tisch, chief executive of Spring.

There is just one thing: The entity on the other end talking to you and helping you choose the shoes is not human. It is a chatbot, a relatively simple piece of software that uses artificial intelligence to carry on a conversation.

While chatbots have been around for some time — think of SmarterChild, the friendly buddy that was popular on AOL Instant Messenger more than a decade ago — companies are now increasingly betting that a grand bot resurgence is coming, one that will change the way people interact with their most beloved brands.

Last week, Facebook underlined the rise of bots at its annual F8 developer conference in San Francisco. Facebook said it was opening up Messenger, its own messaging app, so that any outside company — from Applebee’s to Zara — could create a bot capable of interacting with people through the chat program.

With the move, Facebook is aiming to usher in a new era of customer service by bringing together the 900 million regular monthly users of Messenger with the more than 15 million businesses that have an official brand page on Facebook. Facebook is kicking off the project with partners like Spring, 1-800-Flowers, a weather and travel app called Poncho and news partners like CNN. Facebook is also testing advertising on chatbots as a potential source of revenue.

“We’re conversational creatures,” David A Marcus, vice president of messaging at Facebook, said of chat. “That’s the way our brain functions. That’s the way we’re wired. As a result, it’s probably the most natural interface there is.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, also sketched out his grand vision at the conference for the company’s future over the next five, 10 and 15 years. Under his plan, people would accompany Facebook as it builds out a comprehensive global system of communications, virtual reality and shopping.

“We all have a desire to be understood and relate to each other,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re always trying to get closer to capturing the purest form.”

Facebook’s push into chatbots, which is part of that vision, follows other recent signs of bot life. Late last month, Microsoft released a bot called Tay that was designed to have discussions with people on Twitter — only to curtail the effort when people taught the software to repeat racist and other offensive remarks. Still, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, trumpeted bots days later at a developer conference, saying the software could be used to produce new methods of interaction.

Kik, a messaging service home to more than 275 million users, also introduced a “bot store” this month that features bots from companies like The Weather Channel (the bot delivers regular weather forecasts) and the cosmetics company Sephora (the bot offers up skin care and makeup tips). Telegram, the messaging app, recently updated its bots platform for developers. And smaller startups such as Operator, an e-commerce app, have integrated bots into their service to make it easier for people to buy things by describing the items using chat.

Underlying many of these bot efforts is their presence primarily on messaging services, which are increasingly becoming a primary form of communication and computing. More than 1.6 billion people are projected to become regular users of mobile messaging apps by the end of this year, equivalent to 22 percent of the global population, according to eMarketer, an industry research firm. That figure is expected to reach 2 billion people by 2018.

The bot revival is also taking place at a time when people are growing tired of individual apps. While big brands have long promoted easier access to shopping and customer service through their own proprietary smartphone apps, some consumers are fatigued by having to download a different app for each company. More than a quarter of the time spent on mobile apps by Americans is now focused on just a handful of social networking and communication apps, according to Forrester, an industry research firm.

As a result, brands in search of the best way to talk to consumers are now pairing off with some the world’s dominant messaging platforms — and their chatbots.

“Imagine if you had, say, 10 bot interactions a day, and if your entire daily commercial life was powered by a chat platform,” said Ted Livingston, chief executive of Kik. “How that platform works — and who controls it — is going to be very important.”

Kik is heavily promoting its “bot store” to lure businesses to its platform.
There are no guarantees the bot medium will take off. Facebook, Kik and Microsoft are up against other artificially intelligent assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Echo, the hardware devices that are voice-controlled — no typing required. And making each transaction into a personal conversation may not be what people need when they just want to book a flight or order food.

“A lot of apps are already incredibly functional,” said Robin Chan, chief executive of Operator. “Take Uber, for example: You just push a button and it works. You don’t need a drawn-out conversation for every single app.”

Regardless, the bot wave is coming, said John Lilly, a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners who has long been interested in bots and artificial intelligence. It may not come right now, with consumers needing to type in “command line"-style text to the chatbots, but he said the trend may gather momentum as bots increasingly blend technology and “human product design,” whatever form that may take.

Conversing with a chatbot to shop feels “magical,” Tisch said, though “in reality, much of commerce is happening through the conversations we’re already having all the time.”