The technology underneath is not new but 2017 it’s been the most prolific year for chatbot development. If we don’t want the industry to die, 2018 should be the year of massive user adoption.

Many users feel disappointed with chatbots because they can’t fulfill what’s expected from them. However, there a few players doing some really good proposals. It might be true that NLP (Natural Language Processing) is not as advanced as we all would want, but there have been successful chatbots since 2001 with SmarterChild!

At BEEVA we expect that the trends in the next year will be around the following topics: Use cases, Personality, Context, Webviews and Omnichannel.

If you are looking for a chatbot or voice interface expert let me know at hi@jesusmartin.eu

Use Cases

With all the available tools in the market anyone can deploy a chatbot in a matter of minutes. That’s why in 2018 we will see every possible use case being implemented. Do you remember those days when you were able to find and app for anything you could imagine? Back then, Apple registred the brand “There’s an app for that”, and we are going to be living exactly the same situation with chatbots, and “There’s a bot for that” will become a real thing.

Designers have two important challenges to deal with.

First of all, we will need to adapt all those ideas to the new format. Imagine anything you were able to do with an app, what’s the best way to deal with the situation in a pure conversational model? Learning piano lessons with Mozart or changing the channel in your TV will be possible soon. How are we going to design all those new interactions?

Secondly, regarding product design, we will need to analyze the results of all that experimentation and realize which scenarios are better for a profitable business model. Looks like the best way to maximize the return of investment nowadays is related with developing chatbots that deal with easy-to-answer questions, leveraging the volume of requests to human call centers. Hopefully all the ongoing experimentation will show us some other interesting models.

Taken from CHAT BOTS! A Consumer Research Study | June 2016 see: clvr.co/chatbots

Personality

Two of the most famous chatbots in history, Eugene Goostman and SmarterChild, gave us some thoughts about how personality could be the keypoint for success. Eugene was the first AI to pass the Turing Test thanks to its 13-year-old personality, and SmarterChild reached 30 million users thanks to its humor and its strong character.

The best example nowadays about personality it’s the popular Poncho, the weather cat, which identity is crafted by a team of writers in charge of every single message sent by the chatbot.

Personality is not only a way to engage users and create empathy but a way to reduce the number of topics and the words that will be used in the interaction.

(If you are interested in Personality on chatbots check out this tool I’ve been participating — http://naiz.chat/)

Context

Being able to understand when and where the conversations take place and its context, will help us to have a better understanding of the user needs. Understanding the chatbot context will increase the success ratio of our chatbots and reduce the frustration they tend to produce on users. In 2018 we will see solutions working on this side, which leads us to an interesting dilemma: How much a chatbot can know about us? Wouldn’t that be scary?

Webviews

Creating successful conversation flows for every scenario is a really difficult task, and that’s why most of the messaging platforms count with rich UI elements, like buttons, carousels and so on. The last step on this situation it’s been the inclusion of webviews on their platforms where any interface can be loaded as if it was any other app.

Despite we know that this is going to be a trend, we consider webviews as a bad practice in the conversational challenge and we encourage designers to avoid its use. Using webviews is a shortcut that won’t work with voice assistants and with other interfaces willing to deal with the conversational problem. If you need to use a webview for your use case, maybe you need to reconsider the use case itself.

Omnichannel or Multimodality

Against the use of webviews we recommend an Omnichannel approach for those “impossible” interactions. Any time soon a lot of chatbots will have arms that will extend its use outside the messaging platform, showing relevant information in our SmartTV or our fridge.

Conclusions

Chatbots are here to stay but 2018 needs to be the year of maturity for them. We will still see a lot of experimentation but soon they will need to face the reality and the results. Until the killer chatbot arrives, we predict that these 5 topics will be holding the conversation around chatbot design.