Since the launch of the Messenger Platform and bots, (a handy summary by Mashable) the world has had a lot to say about this move by Facebook – ranging from “fantastic start” to “frustrating and useless“. Somewhere in the middle probably lies the truth. Facebook is, of course, not the only player in this specific game – to name a few, Slack, Telegram, Kik all are at it! A more elaborate representation of the landscape can be found here.
Somewhere in all this hype is a little grain of truth. For instance, two (plus one) trends, as explained in this post by MG Siegler, are pretty evident – the rise of messaging, app saturation and the increasing application of AI/machine learning. Bots are well placed in the intersection of these three.
It goes without saying that this works very well into the Facebook scheme of things – it controls two messaging platforms that have a billion users each, its apps are on the first screen for most users, and just as reports surface on how personal status sharing is seeing a drop, they have found an alternate way to keep users engaged, and will obviously find a way to make businesses pay for it soon! If we go by Marc Andreessen, there are “only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is unbundle.” (via) After a series of unbundling efforts, we might see Facebook start to bundle everything for businesses – advertising to social shopping to customer care. (interesting read in this context)
But the way I see it, this is (relatively) incremental, and given the decreasing lifespan of interfaces, at best has a medium term shelf life. A couple of articles I read recently frame this perspective well. Facebook, as the first one says, is an Information Age native, while we are moving to the Experience Age, and it, along with others, are on a race to build an experience stack using technology that goes beyond mobile as an interface – think VR, sensors etc. While Facebook gets a significant share in that post, I think the future is more ambient interfaces. Or to quote from the title of this interesting post – “The next AI is no AI“. That’s why I find the paths of the remaining three horsemen more interesting.
While Apple has understood the impending shift of interface, and brought out the Apple Watch, the response was not really Apple-level overwhelming, and Siri continues to be a good toy. However, both CarPlay as well as Apple Pay are potentially door openers into completely new ecosystems and interfaces.
Amazon’s Echo (+Alexa) is scaling up quite quickly with integrations that range from smart home to automotive to services!
My favourite though, continues to be Google. Its CEO has stated that we’re evolving in computing from a ‘mobile-first’ to an ‘AI-first’ world. And if you’ve been watching Google Now, you can see how it’s using search, location, image recognition, browsing history to increasingly pushes relevant content that ranges from news to traffic to flight times and so on, through its interactive cards. (Its AI engine is even reading romance novels to make itself more conversational!) At I/O2016, the focus on AI was abundantly clear. Its Echo competitor will arrive soon – Google Home. Home, as well as Google’s new messaging app – Allo, will be powered by the improved Google Assistant. Not to forget Android Auto, which is now going to have Waze involved.
But more importantly, when I look at this from the relevance-resonance perspective that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, while both Facebook and Google can compete on relevance, Google’s approach seems to resonate with me much more than the others, simply because the AI just seems more ‘intelligent’. But then, this is only the beginning.
