How Kik Predicted the Rise of Chat Bots
backchannel.com
backchannel.com
I mean, especially on IRC, with Eggdrop. My favourite was always: https://github.com/jamesoff/bmotion
Edit:
Also consider how much information is on your phone, and how easy it is to access it than with a browser on your laptop. With the click of a button you give an app access to your contacts and other information. A chat bot you install wont really have this access, even if you gave it access, you wont normally keep your contacts on your system, not unless you use a Windows phone and it syncs to your Windows account (assuming this is a "thing" they do).
I'll give you a better example than that in Angry Birds. Crush the Castle was a staple of mine for at least a year or two LOOONG before Angry Birds showed up; ultimately the exact same format of a game except your projectile was a trebuchet and not a slingshot. Angry Birds showed up on the smartphone and ate Crush The Castle's forever remaining lunches.
Hell, if you want to go back farther than that I think it was a game called 'Armor', fire at thing, destroy thing, upgrade and fire again for points. But yeah, that first sentence nails it completely.
Can't wait for someone to "innovate" mIRC's scriptable client into their product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggdrop
Slack has effectively re-created irc and bots in a modern client.
It's nice mobile messaging platforms are joining the past and present with the future, let's just not call it innovation.
The leap forward wasn't the tcl code quality, but an order of magnitude forward in what bots allowed to be possible in providing security to irc channels along with a host of other solutions simply was unparalleled.
Kik invented Chat bots, even tho IRC had them way before.
Your next startup invented xyz, even tho IRC had them way before.
> Pad (general-purpose computer message board), 1973, the first such, and a few months later, system-defined Notesfiles, precursors to Unix Newsgroups, Digital DECnotes and Lotus Notes.
> Talkomatic (text-based) (6-room, 5-persons-per-room real-time chat room), 1973, precursor to Instant Messaging Conferences.
Plus, emoticons in the 1970s! http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2012/09/plato-emoticons-rev...
To me, chat bots seem like a step backward, at least for the use cases I've seen them applied for.
They're gambling on the fact that bots will set their platform apart from all the other chat apps. Of course, now, everyone else also has bots. But the article is about how they did it first (out of the "western" chat apps).
a) The anticipation that AI will be good enough to understand an instruction set through sentences. In some cases it already is.
b) Text isn't so much the interface but audio-voice interfaces are. The stuff from A) combined with voice recognition.
It is somewhat weird because Siri has been around for a while, Google voice recognition/search has been around for a while and been really good. Maybe the big aha moment was Amazon letting users actually input commands like ordering a product rather than getting dumped on search results for the web page to do it.
If the whole chat-voice-smart assistant thing is a winner takes all market, that winner probably replaces Google in mass market use cases for search. That is a really big deal and companies are salivating over the possibility.
Perhaps another factor is because other companies don't really have a knowledge graph like Google's, they are letting third party developers plug in.
So, the big tech companies have their products commercially available already and are being used by lots of people, the small tech companies have stuff they have been working on and are joining the hype cycle in hopes of being acquired.
So in summary the larger story is "chat bot" really = AI voice assistant which is plausibly the next Google eclipsing platform, and about as massive of a deal for the tech industry as the smart phone and self driving car.
But there are reasons texting arose as a preferred alternative to voice. Audio interfaces will win in cars, possibly homes and other well-defined private spaces. But text is ubiquitous and visual interfaces are so much faster, as audio is limited by its linear dimension.
No doubt, voice control will be a huge market, but I think the idea is more alluring than the reality will prove.
I mean, if it were actual "junk" (you get what I mean), I mighta be happy, but it's all "come to my private webcam site" kinda crap.
This is, maybe, why Whatsapp is so hugely successful: the cost of SMS/phone verification is too high for scammers.
What Kik seems to have is essentially a web browser with a chat interface overlay where instead of typing in a URL you "mention" (summon?) a bot and the bot then gives you a "button" (link?) you can tap to open the web content.
One thing they do get right though is the idea that the bot should disappear once done and not bother you, however keeping marketers from not abusing that is going to require them to restrict that via code (e.g. session timeout)
Ideally I would want a single conversational chat bot that I can summon, ask to perform a task (regardless of what service is chosen to perform the task), select from the options provided, have the task performed. The bot can select an app to perform the task (deep link) or if no app can do it then some bot (if a bot exists to do that task) or a web link.
Since all links inside their app open in their embedded browser, they can track click-throughs like Google, Facebook, and presumably the quirky 'bot interface' will be popular with people who are already used to chatting. No wonder everyone else is trying to maintain feature parity with them.