Thoughts on Conversational Software

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Thoughts on Conversational Software Chris Messina Developer Experience Lead, Uber April 14, 2016 • Media Kitchen

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• What are we doing here? • Relevant moments in computing history • The Year of Conversational Commerce • So here we are • What we are doing here This talk is pre-conversational

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What are we doing here?

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What are you doing here?

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What am I doing here?

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1968

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What was Doug Engelbart doing then?

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SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground-Environment Computers)

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SAMs near the BOMARC Missile Accident Site

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Cold War

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Lead engineer Bill English using NLS (1968)

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The Mother of All Demos December 9, 1968

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• Graphical “Windows” UI • Window Resizing and Layering • Hyperlinks • Hypermedia • WYSIWYG Word Processing • Contextual Help • Keyword Search • Video calling • Slideshows • Collaborative Document Editing • Version Control • Remote Procedure Calls • Dynamic File Linking • Distribute Client-Server Architecture • Shared Databases Video: SRI International; Text source: Chris Cox

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The original mouse

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Dave Evans in the 60s

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1994

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Steve Jobs 1995

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2007

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Steve Jobs 2007

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2008-2015

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2016

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The Year of Conversational Commerce

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Utilizing chat, messaging, or other natural language interfaces (i.e. voice) to interact with people, brands, or services and bots that heretofore have had no real place in the bidirectional, asynchronous messaging context.

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“symphonic tipping point”

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3,500 Q4 '11 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2 Q3 0 500 1,000 1,500 2,000 2,500 3,000 MESSAGING APPS HAVE SURPASSED SOCIAL NETWORKS Monthly active users for top 4 social networks and messaging apps Big 4 Messaging Apps Big 4 Social Networking Apps Millions BI INTELLIGENCE Source: Companies, Bi Intelligence

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60B vs 20B

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“Alexa, ask Uber to request a ride.” “Alexa, ask Uber to request an UberX.” “Alexa, ask Uber where’s my ride?”

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So here we are

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Conversational software is early

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Bots are not the be-all, end-all solution

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Conversations and bots complement apps

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• Focus less on “acquiring users” in conversational contexts, and more on enriching the relationships you’ve earned

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• Focus less on “acquiring users” in conversational contexts, and more on enriching the relationships you’ve earned • Make it easy to share great experiences and content with your customers’ friends — create content that's screenshot-worthy! • Hand off to web or native apps when it serves the customer’s needs; but don’t drop them in the middle of nowhere: use deep linking to orient and help them complete their task

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Do have an API strategy!

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• “Bot” is a shorthand for an interaction paradigm that is superficially conversational but is augmented and/or facilitated by: • speed, • persistence (identity + cross-device syncing over the cloud), • trust-based operations (payments), • and API integrations