China, WeChat, and the Origins of Chatbots
What we can learn from the successes and shortcomings of the popular platform.
Lately, there has been plenty of conversation in the field of chatbots and clearly there is a desire among us to see chatbots do great things. That grand vision goes as far as replacing applications entirely, making the move from visual UI back into conversational. This article is not about that vision, it is about where and how this phenomenon started.
The answer may surprise you, because that place is China and the company is WeChat. The staggering part though, is not the where, it is the when because WeChat has had a bot platform since 2013! Compared to WeChat — Facebook Messenger bots, Telegram bots and Slack bots, are just toddlers growing up in the presence of an elder. But — and this is a big but, older doesn’t mean better, it means we have a library of mistakes we should not repeat.
Before we deal with those heavy questions, let’s start with the why.
Why Were Chatbots Embraced by Chinese Social Media Earlier Than in the US and in Other Western Countries?
In China, social media has become far more integrated as an organic part of the consumer shopping experience.
Compared to the west, there is a huge difference in Chinese consumer psychology. In general, there is a lack of trust towards locally made products, due to the numerous product safety scandals in the last few years. This has created a tendency for Chinese consumers to elicit the opinions of other consumers and even bombard the brand themselves with questions, before they make a purchase online or in-store.
The sheer number of consumers and their zest for questioning is what created the need for chatbots in China before they ever came into the minds of Facebook and others. WeChat gladly embraced these desires by launching their platform.
WeChat and Its Chatbots
Since the launch of the application in 2009, WeChat has conquered hearts of many users who demonstrate an unwavering loyalty to it. Moving bots aside for a moment, WeChat is a highly successful social media platform in its own right.
In 3Q2016, WeChat’s monthly active user base in China totaled 706.7m, 93% of the company’s global users. China’s smartphone population will exceed 700 million users in 2018 and more than 70% of those people use WeChat. That compares favorably to Facebook’s 67% penetration rate for all US internet users.
Through its platform WeChat has made it easy to create very simple chatbots that are actually not very intelligent. It has become one of the favored ways for customer service to reduce the work they do interacting with customers online. This has its implications, but it doesn’t mean that you cannot construct a highly intelligent bot on WeChat.
Chumen Wenwen a company founded in 2012 by a former Google employee has built a very sophisticated bot that running on WeChat and in other spaces. The company has combined voice recognition, AI and the WeChat platform into a package that queries information for its users. By connecting with third party API’s the app can answer questions about what is around you, including movies, restaurants, massage and more.
Many entrepreneurs doing business in China create an official WeChat account before they even launch their website. There are some VC funded chatbots managed by the companies that don’t even have websites — at the same time, their business is booming and their valuations are skyrocketing.
Types of Chatbots on WeChat
There are two types of official account chatbots: subscription accounts and service accounts. Each of them was launched as a chatbot as we know them today, yet after testing them in action, were modified to rely less on artificial intelligence.
The main users of the subscription accounts are content publishers. Subscribers of these accounts automatically receive a list of the recently published articles. This usually happens once a day. Users tap on an article and view it in an embedded WeChat browser. These accounts are great for people who want to keep track of a brand or some other type of influencer on WeChat.
For businesses this creates a treasure trove of data like — how many users viewed a particular article. This allows entrepreneurs and brands to make conclusions about what content their target audiences like to view. Through A/B testing their marketers can identify ways how to effectively structure it and in which format to craft it.
Customer service for the brands and companies registered on WeChat use service accounts to interact with their clients on the application. Fashion brands, airlines, restaurants, hotels, and e-commerce shops often use chatbots for online interactions.
On WeChat service accounts, all types of messages — information about latest promotions and events, as well as about location of the nearest restaurants and updates on airfares — can be sent to users. In addition to simple interactions of subscriptions accounts, consumers might find themselves engaged in more complex conversations with bots.
Nevertheless, developers and brands acknowledge that at present, their bots are incapable of handling all types of customer requests. As a result these accounts need to be supported by employees.
How Do WeChat Chatbots Work?
The WeChat bot platform is actually a lot simpler than those developing Facebook or Slackbots would expect. WeChat bots work by identifying keywords in text strings and using hand-coded rules for how to respond to different situations. Yet, they still use machine learning and the more users interact with companies and brands via chatbots, the smarter they will become, and the faster they will learn to understand user inputs.
Although bots are gradually learning to understand customer requests, they still text back only pre-set responses. Unfortunately, they cannot give very complex answers to highly specific questions. If the user asks something again, they reply in the same manner. Brand bots on WeChat mainly to provide a basic customer service and also for entertainment.
Unique and Cute ‘Little Ice’
Not all WeChat chatbots are simple. Some of them are capable of leading long and sophisticated conversations and have a distinct personalities. Microsoft developed a chatbot called Xiaoice (in Chinese, 微软小冰 or, literally, “Little Ice”). It was introduced exclusively for Mandarin-speaking users in China.
Microsoft’s Xiaoice has a distinct personality that was developed by systematically mining the Internet for human conversations on Chinese social media. This chatbot is so successful that it went viral within a few days and, of course, garnered lots of attention. Now, it has over 40 million users in China and Japan.
Users say that Xiaoice has a cute voice that stimulates and arouses a multitude of positive emotions. The chatbot can adapt its phrasing based on positive or negative cues from the user’s queries. It was programmed in a way that it avoids saying certain sensitive words that can be censored on WeChat.
For people with strong emotional feelings and the need to discuss problems chatbots can be an ear for them and can offer reassurance when needed. Maybe exactly for this reason, Xiaoice became a great conversational partner for a great many users, as some people are naturally more eager and ready to confide in machines than in other human beings.
Nevertheless, despite XiaoIce’s huge popularity on WeChat, all conversations with this chatbot are mainly carried out for experiment and entertainment.
What Does Future Hold for WeChat Chatbots?
WeChat is installed on almost every smartphone in China, and Chinese people are fully immersed in the world of virtual communication and technological augmentation. With every new release, the application’s functionality is getting better, and chatbots are transforming customer interactions, lifting them to a more sophisticated level.
WeChat users already understand that chatbots can not only have a pleasant and fruitful conversation with them but also offer a sound and useful advice. Companies that have official accounts on WeChat know that chatbots assist them in scaling their customer support teams more efficiently and allow them to respond to a greater number of queries, thus fitting very well into their business models.
We fully expect that in the near future, for individuals, WeChat chatbots will be moving further away from being novelty and objects for entertainment to ubiquity. For businesses, chatbots will also be hitting the mainstream, evolving into a fundamental part of their businesses and into a critical audience retention tool.
However, as on Facebook Messenger and other western platforms, in most cases WeChat bots are not using a truly conversational strategy. WeChat also has buttons that enable users to interact without too much chatting. At this point in time, the head start in bots that WeChat had has resulted in much the same infrastructure we see in the west. For now at least, the race is still on, to see who can build a chatbot that is something more than a website ported into a Facebook Messenger Conversational UI.
