What’s Next for the App Economy 2017
neumob.com
neumob.com
1. Moves away from emailing a company. Just think how many people today are messaging the facebook pages of companies instead of writing these long formal emails to get something. Conversational explaining just ends up being much faster and more convenient for many people.
Look at the overall shift between phone calls -> text and internal business emails -> im/slack
2. Most non-technical people have trouble even being able to interact with a computer (somewhere between 60% - 80% of people still don't know how to google what they want and get it on the first try), moving to a conversational system (if it works right) can rapidly increase the amount of people you can interact with.
this is the crux. Current-era chatbots, and chatbots for the forseeable future (barring some radical breakthroughs in the understanding of intelligence and natural language), are all the same terrible APIs people grapple with now, with an added layer of indirection because at least you can look up an API spec. Just because you can type out full sentences doesn't mean it's a conversation; it's still precisely the problem of API design, i.e., trying to imagine your user's use cases and writing brittle dialogue trees to accomodate them. Except now, the interface layer (Natural Language) is an extra layer of noise.
Your analogy to business communication does not hold, because there's still a human being on the other end of the line in all those communication forms. At the very least, it's someone to scream at when you repeat the same thing 30 times and they don't understand. Instead of a steady refrain of "I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that; could you rephrase it ;)?"
There may be an escalation path, but that can be done in chatbots as well. But yeah, needs to work well enough for it to be useful, and we're definitely not there yet.
But part of the problem is like the RPG's in the text adventure games of the 90s. There's a few good ones, but everyone and their dog thinks they can just make something like that, and ... the results are less than pretty.
What value will bots add? Will the bots be autonomous agents, acting as a person on the other end?
The last thing I want, especially on mobile is to be typing out sentence long inquiries.
Source: running an ethereum meetup since 2014 and (very likely) writing the world's first crowdfunding contract in LLL.
However, I figured that what's holding all the blockchain collaboration platforms back are not only scalability and cost issues. More importantly, people don't want to broadcast their data for very uncertain returns. You can see that in haggling parties for when and who gets access to aggregate data in the connected car, health care and scientific research.
Therefore, I focus to find meaningful ways around data-sharing tensions, specifically in battery R&D [1]. One way is to align academic and commercial interests better. The other way is to objectively measure what a data donor's synergistic effect was on the platform as a whole. This kind of computable attribution is hard, but I think doable at some point and in some narrow domains earlier.
Some infrastructure that allows to selectively reveal and collaborate on data is put forward by guys at MIT [2].