Bot Mania - The Next UX Revolution is Here

The rise of instant messages as the preferred communications platform by consumers, made many companies shift their customer-facing services from applications to chat bots.

Join us for a deep dive into the bot revolution and learn what leading companies are doing in this field and why are they shifting their customer-facing services from applications to chat bots.

We will also review scenarios combining chat bots and AI by looking at Microsoft’s Cortana in Skype as an example.

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Shira Weinberg is a senior product manager in the Cortana Experiences team, Microsoft

Delia Koren is a product designer, specializing in product innovation, strategy and UX.

Transcript

1. The Bot Mania: The internet of bots and Cortana in Skype
2. The Trend
3. 2forces are combining to form a perfect storm and opportunity
4. 1Messaging app growth 2Machine learning/ AI
5. Messaging is the fastest growing online behavior, passing social networks Source: Tech and Media Outlook 2016, active
6. Mid 2015: Messengers took over social media Source: Tech and Media Outlook 2016, active
7. The Numbers Only 43% of smartphone owners use their phones to make calls. Over 70% use them for text-based communication (texting/SMS, messaging, or chat). The average adult spends a total of 23 hours a week texting..
8. What does it have to do with Bots?
9. What are Bots? A bot is a program that automates tasks for you, like showing you the weather each morning or collecting updates from a number of people into a report.
10. What are Chatbots? Chatbots are digital users within a messaging product. They use Natural Language Processing (NLP) which allows them to understand human language and accomplish tasks through two-way conversation, and by this bringing a product or service via the conversational interface.
11. Gen 1 chatbots looked like this: Simple query/response
12. Xiaoice is a natural language chat bot with the personality of a teenage girl and a rich database of online human conversations from which to draw. Xioice has a massive following and is particularly popular among men 16- 24. Users share secrets with her and seem to think of her as a friend. Her image recognition feature is fun (and shareable!). Xiaoice Xiaoice is suggesting that these two should be girlfriend and boyfriend User engages in chat with Xiaoice
13. Giphy lets users post GIFs in a conversation with others Hundreds of bots like these make Slack a really engaging platform. Slack’s /giphy bot
14. Slack has created an $80M investment fund to fund companies who are developing Slack-first products. The aspiration is to improve productivity by handling anything from automating expenses submissions to pulling data from CRM systems into the chat window. Slack
17. Bots have had recent commercial successes fronting online stores and taking payments in China’s top messaging service, WeChat, and this has proved that bots can be monetized. WeChat
18. M is a digital assistant that’s part AI, part human. No gender, personality, or voice, so far, but unique in its ability to complete real-world tasks. Unlike most DAs, M can complete real- world tasks, including make purchases, planning weddings, and negotiating with cable companies. Top request so far: Restaurant suggestions and reservations. Facebook M
19. Facebook started to talk about 4 distinct types of bots that we might soon be using: TRANSACTIONAL CUSTOMER SERVICE SUBJECT MATTER ENTERTAINMENT Allow you to have eCommerce exchanges, track orders or place simple new ones (e.g. the clothing website Spring) Make your entire engagement with a company or service seamless (e.g. KLM allowing you to check in or change your flight details) Experts in their fields and bring you the latest news & information, or help you track down a fact or recipe (e.g. CNNs news summarising bot) Delight or entertain you in other ways, offering humorous exchanges or other drips of content (e.g. the ability to chat to one of The Muppets)
20. Scheduling bots
22. Voice based bots
23. Bot Future
28. “bots are the new apps” Satya Nadella, CEO Microsoft March 30, 2016
29. Microsoft Tay
30. Bots. Now in Skype.
33. Let’s see the vision for Cortana in Skype, as presented at //build What’s Next?
34. 1 It’s the same Cortana, available everywhere 2 Cortana is the one to help you find experts (discover bots) 3 Cortana holds your state and context and can pass it to the expert bot
35. websites bots apps
36. So… are they here to stay?
37. Questions?
38. Thanks.