By Ben Lamm
In April 2017, Facebook launched the Messenger Bot Store. TechCrunch posited Facebooks Messenger Bot Store could be the most important launch since the App Store. Less than nine months later at CES, Facebook announced M was dead. WIRED declared Facebooks virtual assistant M is dead. So are chatbots.
Despite these declarations, bots in some form were all over CES. Forrester Researchs JP Gownder noted its the year of AI and conversational interfaces.
So which is it? Are bots alive? Dead? Have they mutated into something else like Sam Neills dinosaurs in Jurassic Park?
The truth is, to the tech world, the old-world bots are dead. And thats perhaps the best news for chatbots and enterprises in years.
Happily in the trough
Bots have been hyped for years. 2016 was going to be the year of the bot. Then 2017. Chatbots have become the punchline for every snarky technologist feigning an understanding of where NLP, AI, and ML technologies currently stand. Which means were right on track.
The chatbot hype cycle has been ebbing along as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and other conversational interface technologies progress. We started out with troll bots on Twitter from nefarious actors and before you knew it we had bots for dad jokes and ones that could turn Lebron James into a chicken. Those apps stayed on our phones for about a month until the novelty wore off. In the most successful (and useful) applications we were able to schedule meetings and order pizza.
We dont remember these wins though. We remember the failures. And when Microsofts Tay turned into a racist within 24 hours of release, we all laughed. If one of the biggest technology companies in existence couldnt prevent a chatbot from becoming an anti-semite, what hope was there for the technology writ large?
Since Tay, the technology world has been waiting for something to prove that chatbots arent a joke. Every wins are too little to overcome their reputation and every loss another nail in their coffin. With the death of M, we are officially in the trough of disillusionment in the Gartner hype cycle.
The reality is weve been talking about bots the way wed talk about the latest fashion trends. We werent really using bots for value; we were using them to be entertained. Both are well within the realm of chatbot capabilities, but the onus is on the humans making the chatbot to make it valuable. When turning novelty into value became hard, Facebook killed M, WIRED eulogized chatbots, and we all laughed.
Stop blaming the bot
Form is function and function is form. And building a chatbot for the sake of having a chatbot will result in a functionless form. The furthest most CMOs or CTOs ever got when strategizing about the technology was we need a bot. Many built and deployed those bots, and even the ones that didnt cause a PR dumpster fire were seen as having little return of investment. And so we blamed the tech.
For many businesses, of course, this has not been the case. One of the earliest success stories was Dominos, one of the first large brands out of the gate with a chatbot that could do something for you.
Granted, with such discrete interactions, some complained that they couldnt chat aimlessly with the bot. However, slowly the consumer caught up. They realized the bot was providing value in the form of a frictionless pizza-ordering experience.
The truth is Dominos modest approach to the technology and not over-promising on its abilities was the smartest approach they couldve taken. Dominos isnt in the entertainment business theyre in the pizza business. And they didnt forget it in the face of the potential of this new technology.
Tay was more of a thought piece and an exercise in programming than a legitimate use of the technology in its current state. It served no purpose other than to entertain. And when Tay was manipulated to be even more entertaining by way of naziism by Twitter, we were shocked.
Without a discrete purpose, engineers can only predict out so far the permutations of human conversation. There is so much about the technology that were still learning, and without focusing on a north star based in actual business and customer value, were bound to get it wrong 9 times out of 10. The only way to progress the technology is to find real uses and build on them over time.
Toys die. What we find entertaining mutates faster than the speed of light. Things that we derive value from, on the other hand, stick around a lot longer.
Thats why at the same time we all eulogize chatbots, were seeing these technologies grow. More brands than ever before are using bots to improve the customer experience. Because chatbots are done as entertainment. And that means their real adoption is only beginning.
The plateau of productivity
Its fitting that M was killed off at CES, the worlds largest celebration of the place where technology and entertainment meet. M wasnt entertaining enough, nor useful. Not for Facebook, not for its users.
Now that were free of the constraint of needing to be entertaining, we can rise to the plateau of productivity the place where technology improves and use cases and adoption grow. Venturebeat is already calling 2018 the year that enterprise adopts bots.
Chasing trendiness and novelty is a fools errand. Most trends are dead by the time we understand them, but the ability to build a better mousetrap will always be in style. So stop obsessing about tech trends. Lasting technologies arent built on virality or the ability to entertain ad infinitum. Theyre built on customer and business value. Anything else is just bad business.
Ben Lamm is cofounder and CEO of Hypergiant as well as the cofounder and CEO of Conversable.
This article has been previously published on The Next Web.