Bot-Week
January, 2007 will be forever remembered in tech lore as the day Steve Jobs launched the iPhone. In years to come, will we look back on the week of April 11, 2016 as the seminal week that launched a new bot-powered era?
On Monday that Betaworks* launched an incubator for bot-centric companies, BotCamp. On the same day, fast rising Telegram announced their Bot 2.0 offering.
On Tuesday at f8, Facebook launched the much-leaked Messenger platform and a number of chat-bots including one a weather bot from Poncho*.
Just a few weeks ago the CEO of Microsoft had proclaimed that Bots were the new apps. Yesterday, the co-founder of Messaging-as-a-service company Layer countered that “Bots won’t replace Apps.” Who is right?
In the meantime Bot-mania might have reached a peak. This is a Google Trends graph for “chatbot” over the past 12 months:
At f8, I had the pleasure of watching the keynote sitting to a man some have called the “father of messaging” and throughout the presentation he kept showing me links on his phone that reminded me that messaging based agents are not new (any of us who used IRC will remember bots). His point was that this was not new…
…what is new and was cemented this week was the powerful combination of:
a) the proliferation of messaging platforms at an unprecedented scale (WeChat, Messenger, Whatsapp, Kakao, Line, Kik, Snapchat, Slack, etc)
b) the advances in AI that allow conversations to broaden beyond hard-coded conversational trees into true dialogues
c) The API layers that allow these bots to much more efficiently enable actions from hailing an uber to invoking a news summary to discovering a restaurant or buying a new jacket.
Many others are opining on whether chatbots are or are not the new apps, many are building bots, many more (including the big boys) are building products to enable bots. Let’s check in in a few years and see whether “Bot-week” in April 2016 truly turns out to be the milestone moment.
*Betaworks is a White Star Capital portfolio company and Poncho is a Betaworks company.
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Christian Hernandez is the co-founder and Managing Partner of White Star Capital, an early-stage Venture Capital fund backing exceptional entrepreneurs with global ambitions. www.whitestarvc.com
