What Is A Chatbot?

A chatbot is a service, powered by rules and sometimes artificial intelligence, that you interact with via a chat interface. The service could be any number of things, ranging from functional to fun, and it could live in any major chat product (Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram, Text Messages, etc.).

“Many businesses already have phone trees and they do work though most users get grumpy using them. Text based response trees are much easier and faster and that is what I expect a lot of early bot interactions to be. Sometimes with ability to chat with a live person.” — Josh Elman, Partner at Greylock

If you haven’t wrapped your head around it yet, don’t worry. Here’s an example to help you visualize a chatbot.

Example:

If you wanted to buy shoes from Nordstrom online, you would go to their website, look around until you find the shoes you wanted, and then you would purchase them.

If Nordstrom makes a bot, which I’m sure they will, you would simply be able to message Nordstrom on Facebook. It would ask you what you’re looking for and you would simply… tell it.

Instead of browsing a website, you will have a conversation with the Nordstrom bot, mirroring the type of experience you would get when you go into the retail store.

Facebook Showing Examples of Chat Bots

Watch this video from Facebook’s recent F8 conference (where they make their major announcements). At the 7:30 mark, David Marcus, the Vice President of Messaging Products at Facebook, explains what it looks like to buy shoes in a Facebook Messenger bot.

Examples of Chatbots

Buying shoes isn’t the only thing chatbots can be used for. Here are a couple of other examples:

Weather bot. Get the weather whenever you ask.

Grocery bot. Help me pick out and order groceries for the week.

News bot. Ask it to tell you when ever something interesting happens.

Life advice bot. I’ll tell it my problems and it helps me think of solutions.

Personal finance bot. It helps me manage my money better.

Scheduling bot. Get me a meeting with someone on the Messenger team at Facebook.

A bot that’s your friend. In China there is a bot called Xiaoice, built by Microsoft, that over 20 million people talk to.

See? With bots, the possibilities are endless. You can build anything imaginable, and I encourage you to do just that.

But why make a bot? Sure, it looks cool, it’s using some super advanced technology, but why should someone spend their time and energy on it?

It’s a huge opportunity. HUGE. Scroll down and I’ll explain.