Why You Might Soon Text Robots as Often as Your Friends
Why You Might Soon Text Robots as Often as Your Friends
By BRANDON BAILEY, AP TECHNOLOGY WRITER SAN FRANCISCO —
Apr 11, 2016, 3:12 PM ET
The robots are coming — to help run your life or sell you
stuff — at an online texting service near you.
In coming months, users of Facebook's Messenger app,
Microsoft's Skype and Canada's Kik can expect to find new automated assistants
offering information and services at a variety of businesses. These messaging
"chatbots" are basically software that can conduct human-like
conversation and do simple jobs once reserved for people. Google and other
companies are reportedly working on similar ideas.
In Asia, software butlers are already part of the
landscape. When Washington, D.C., attorney Samantha Guo visited China recently,
the 32-year-old said she was amazed at how extensively her friends used bots
and similar technology on the texting service WeChat to pay for meals, order
movie tickets and even send each other gifts.
"It was mind-blowing," Guo said. U.S. services
lag way behind, she added.
Online messaging has become routine for most people,
offering more immediacy than email or voice calls, said Michael Wolf, a media
and technology consultant. Messaging services are now growing faster than
traditional online social platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, according to
research by Wolf's firm, Activate.
And experts say messaging bots can handle a wider range
of tasks than apps offered by retailers and other consumer businesses. In part,
that's because bots can recognize a variety of spoken or typed phrases, where
apps force users to choose from options on a drop-down menu. Reaching a chatbot
can be as simple as clicking a link in an online ad or scanning a boxy bar code
with a smartphone camera. A special-purpose app requires a download and often a
new account sign-up.
"Bots are the new apps," Microsoft CEO Satya
Nadella said last month. Microsoft has just created new programming tools for
businesses to build bots that will interact with customers on Skype, the
Microsoft-owned Internet voice, video and messaging service.
Facebook is widely expected to unveil similar tools for
its Messenger chat service at the company's annual software conference starting
Tuesday. It's already partnered with a few online retailers and transportation
companies so consumers can use Messenger to check the status of a clothing
purchase from online retailer Zulily, order car service from Uber or get a
boarding pass from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.
At those services, automated chatbots handle some
interactions, with supervision from human operators. Similarly, Facebook has
been testing a digital assistant called "M'' — sort of like Apple's Siri
or Microsoft's Cortana — that can answer questions or perform tasks like
ordering flowers in response to commands on Messenger. It uses a combination of
artificial intelligence and input from human overseers.
Another messaging service, Kik, which is popular among
U.S. teenagers, opened a new "bot shop" last week. Kik users can talk
to bots that will answer questions about the weather, show funny videos or help
with online shopping. Slack, a messaging service used by businesses, has
partnered with Taco Bell to introduce a "Taco Bot" that helps Slack
users order ahead for meals at a local outlet.
In Asia, many smartphone owners are used to playing games
and buying items through messaging services like WeChat, which claims 700
million active users. One in five WeChat users has added bank or credit card
information so that person can check balances, pay bills or send money to
friends, according to the Andreesen Horowitz venture capital firm.
Tech experts are particularly eager to see what Facebook
does with Messenger, since its 900 million users make it the world's second
biggest chat platform after WhatsApp, which claims 1 billion users. Facebook
bought WhatsApp in 2014.
Both are free to users and don't produce much revenue for
Facebook. But if Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has given WhatsApp's co-founders
leeway with their service, executives have signaled they are increasingly
looking for ways to make money from Messenger.
Although Facebook has not ruled out advertising on
Messenger, analyst Ken Sena of the Evercore investment firm says a more
immediate revenue source could be fees from businesses, such as hotel and
travel companies offering to provide reservations and other services through
the chat app.
With the help of artificial intelligence programs that
learn from interactions, Sena said in a recent report, chatbots "are
becoming scarily good" at carrying on human-like conversations.
Or sometimes just scary. Microsoft last month shut down
an experimental chatbot , known as Tay, after malicious Twitter users taught
the program to repeat racist and sexist statements. Undeterred, the company has
pledged to learn from the experience and build better software in the future.
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