Google’s Chatbase Analytics — Good For Developers? Definitely Good For Google
Search company has been locked out of chatbot conversations
Google’s quiet debut Wednesday of Chatbase, an analytics API for chatbot developers, won’t be mainstream news. It’s a tool for tracking user activity and feedback — ”intents” is the tech jargon — in chatbots, a field in which Google doesn’t have a real entry.
Chtabase’s tracking of Messenger bots is currently limited to text messages — Messenger bots have had video for a while.
You can read the technical docs and occasionally reload a TechCrunch post that is being updated during Wednesday’s Google I/O conference for software developers. Chatbot analytics will hardly be the big news from the event.
For bot makers, it’s a free tool from Google that may offer one or more features current offerings such as Dashbot don’t have. Right now, though, its tracking of Messenger bots on Facebook (the largest chatbot platform) is limited to text messages — Messenger bots have had video content for a while.
Chatbase’s guaranteed beneficiary is Google. There are millions of chat messages to and from bots every day. Google, which aims to “organize the world’s information,” knows nothing about them. Chatbase won’t enable Google to eavesdrop on your naughty back-and-forth with the Christian Grey bot. They won’t become Googleable.
But just knowing about the behavioral patterns of a large chunk of chatbot users will, like the FBI tracking who calls who, tell Google a lot about what chatbot users want, how they behave, and what works (or not) in a bot.
The docs encourage chatbot developers to solicit feedback, which Google will analyze for sentiment — is your human chatter happy, sad or mad?
What will Google do with all this analysis? Who knows. Google may not even know yet. But it’s a way for Google to at least get a glimpse of Facebook’s private party.
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