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Comment by pbreit | Hacker News Reader

I like bots and everything but I wonder if chat's popularity stems from there being a human at the other end?

The current bots trends started when silicon valley saw how successful WeChat is building a platform on top of its chat app. It has an eco that is not tied to AppStore/PlayStore. What WeChat is doing is more of building apps rather than bots on top of WeChat. They took the idea of SMS apps (e.g. SMS to vote for American Idol, SMS to top up your mobile data plan) and model it for chat. So one can basically build an Uber app inside WeChat, and that's what Uber's China competitor DiDi is doing. WeChat users in China can do all their Didi, shopping, order food, buy cinema tickets, book train tickets, payment, online banking all within WeChat app. Fast forward few years to 2015, and Slack bots become a thing. So interactive apps via text commands become bots as it gains more intelligence (or not like the case of Tay by Microsoft). Facebook is doing catch up and apparently it is different from WeChat. One crucial thing that made WeChat so successful is payment, and that enables commerce via the platform. There is no such option in Messenger. Maybe not ready or Facebook has a different direction for its bots platform.

https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/750020781733477/

You can send money in messenger. Not too hard to move from P2P payments to P2B payments.

I don't think so. 15 years ago I created a service to let people access data from my company's intranet via AOL Instant Messenger (which everyone was already using for internal chat). It was still a big hit. People loved the convenience of just being able to ping a bot and immediately get back Client X's phone number, instead of having to wade through umpty-ump levels of menus and web pages to get the same info.

The interface to that service was extremely crude by today's standards (basically a set of magic keywords that comprised a simple query language), but people liked the convenience so much they were more than willing how to talk to the bot in its own lingo. I can only imagine how much more popular it would have been if it had a real, natural-language chat interface.

As long as it's easy and convenient, and comes back with the right answers (a big if, that last one), nobody will care if there's a human on the other end or not.

Funny thing - the bot you described is essentially a CLI. I'm willing to bet that at least some of the same people who happily used it would also be terrified by the real command line.

Reminds me also of an observation that a lot of people in accounting are actually programming without realizing it, by virtue of making pretty complex Excel spreadsheets to automate their work.

It's funny how much of users' apparent inability to grok computers is actually in their heads. Also, the fetishization of GUIs that has been going on for the past two decades is actually quite sad - it robs people of efficiency and convenience in using the machine.

If they were so popular, why do they still not exist in any meaningful sense to this day?

I was all over IMified & ActiveBuddy when they came out 10-15 years ago but they never really took off at all. My agent basically returned the Google "magic box" which was kinda cool.

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