We also saw many voice bot builders like PullString or Storyline coming to the market to help companies build easily voice-based chatbot.

I think in 2018 this trend will continue; we might see some early success from a few voice bots. Although there are many challenges on the table developers should solve to take Voice UI to the mainstream.

Early Winners in Conversational Interfaces

The area where I am most excited about is the progress in conversational interfaces. As I mentioned in my previous post many companies realized that NLP is not ready yet so they started to experiment with the approach of Conversational Interfaces (aka interface-based chatbots). In 2017 we have seen a lot of interesting new uses cases for CI. Among the different cases, marketing and sales stood out with a strong fit. Companies like Drift and iAdvize is betting big on the so-called conversational marketing to help businesses get rid of annoying forms with conversations.

Very related to the previous point there is also a new trend toward building hyper-personalized experiences with the rise of conversational websites. Here we can see Landbot.io among many other players taking the lead to help companies improve their customer experience with conversational interfaces.

In 2018, I predict we will continue to see strong growth in conversational interfaces where some players will emerge as early winners of the market.

Blockchain the Surprising Ally for Chatbot

Last but not least, in 2017 we all have seen the hyper-growth of Cryptocurrencies where Bitcoin and Etherum are in the headline of every major media news. Bitcoin has already passed the 18k dollars milestone. Bubble or not, we can see blockchain is rapidly changing the technology landscape.

Some players in the chatbot space have already started to toy around with this new technology. For example, Kik launched their own crypto-token “KIP” which raised 100M$ to build virtual economy inside its messaging platform. Another chatbot company called Sensay is also betting big on the blockchain. They launched the Sense token to provide its human network of advice givers incentive to use the bot and continue offering advice on subjects ranging from relationships (most popular) to where to find dank memes.

With the continuous growth of blockchain, I can see that in 2018 more chatbot companies will take advantage of cryptocurrencies to strengthen their value proposition.

Conclusions

A final word about my bot-predictions, all these trends won´t happen in a vacuum. We will more likely see trends affecting each other generating unexpected results. But no matter what happens, we can confirm the Chatbot industry will enter a new phase and become more mature. There is a lot of opportunities for new startups and current players. So let us all focus on building frictionless Conversational experiences to take chatbot to the next level!

For more content from me please subscribe to my WhatsApp Newsletter 🙌