The Facebook-based chatbot HillYEAH! suggests pro-Clinton messages for people to post on social media, provides a cartoon version of the candidate for them to use as their profile picture, and reminds them of their state’s voting deadlines. | Getty How chatbots are colonizing politics

Chatbots, one of the hottest trends in consumer technology, are invading the 2016 election, with Democrats and progressives deploying the artificial intelligence-powered software to do things like register voters and keep supporters engaged with Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Type a question or statement to an online chatbot, and it will attempt to respond like a human would. They can be pulled up with a few key strokes on popular services like Facebook Messenger or via SMS text. Though chatbot technology has existed for years, it's entering the mainstream thanks in part to products like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Echo, which have quickly taught people that having a conversation with a machine isn't all that strange.


Now, some in politics are trying to harness the power of bots to influence the presidential election. Chief among them is HelloVote, a Facebook- and text-based chatbot that launched in September to tackle voter registration. It was developed by a group that includes Elana Berkowitz — a member the Clinton campaign’s braintrust of outside tech policy advisers — and digital advocacy group Fight for the Future.

“Most of the implementation of chatbots so far, while helpful, have been about improving the e-commerce experience,” said Berkowitz, a Brooklyn-based tech startup adviser and former aide to Clinton at the State Department. “But if we’ve gotten really good at making it really easy to use your mobile phone to order a shirt or a burger or a car, it’s pretty striking taking basic civic actions through your phone has remained so complex.”

HelloVote greets users with a simple message, promising "I can get you registered to vote with just a few messages.” If a voter’s state allows online registration, the bot uses the users’ responses to fill in the necessary forms behind the scenes, in real time. In states that require a ‘wet signature,’ voters have the option to be emailed or snail-mailed the completed form. The process takes under two minutes.

Closer to election day, HelloVote will switch gears — pinging users with local details on where and how to go vote. (Berkowitz said the bot is non-partisan and nonprofit, and she’s not coordinating get-out-the-vote efforts with the Clinton campaign.)

People are likely to run across a chatbot when their friends post it on their social media feeds; the featured tweet on TV star Ellen DeGeneres' Twitter account points fans to HelloVote. The bots appeal to smartphone users who are less interested in downloading apps but click and swipe every notification message that pops up on their mobile screens, said Matt Hartman, a partner at the New York City “startup studio” betaworks. In April, betaworks launched botcamp for aspiring bot makers.

“The way the world is going is that people want these micro-interactions that are super easy to deal with, and then they go back to what they were doing,” Hartman said.

Some of the tech industry's biggest companies are investing in chatbots, fueling interest in the technology. In April, Facebook opened its hugely popular Messaging platform to bot developers. Google announced recently that it is buying the chatbot platform startup API.ai. The group-chat tool Slack has introduced many business users to bots. Media companies TechCrunch, CNN, and Quartz are experimenting with chatbots, as are small-dollar savings service Digit, Match.com and travel site Hipmunk.

But some also see powerful potential in chatbots for political organizing — especially when it comes to boring bureaucratic tasks like filling out voter forms or staying in contact with otherwise hard-to-reach would-be supporters.

The Facebook-based chatbot HillYEAH! suggests pro-Clinton messages for people to post on social media, provides a cartoon version of the candidate for them to use as their profile picture, and reminds them of their state’s voting deadlines. Launched at the beginning of September, it is the election-season project of a small team that includes a former data analytics intern for the Clinton campaign.

Other political chatbots include StayWoke, a Twitter-based bot for rallying the Black Lives Matter community co-created by activist DeRay Mckesson. And, in August, the White House rolled out a Facebook chatbot that makes it trivially easy to send a message to President Barack Obama.

But non-political chatbots are catching election fever, too. Poncho exists to chat with millennials about the daily weather forecast where they live. (Ask Poncho about the pollen level in Washington, for example, and it will respond back with a note like, “You can go outside just long enough to get a snack.”)

Earlier this month, though, Poncho strayed from the weather and into the election. “Trump, Clinton, Justin, Kelly … voting is hard. I can help! Are you registered?” said the bot in an “American Idol”-referencing text message to some users.

The company plans to blast out the pro-voting messages widely over the next couple weeks, said Poncho CEO Sam Mandel: “The reason we did it is because our team really wanted to. This is a really important election, and most of our team is in their twenties. They felt it was important.”

Experiments with the political applications of chatbots are still in their early, “Sure, why not?” days. Ken Goldberg, robotics expert and professor at the University of California at Berkeley, points to chatbots that aggregate the words of Einstein or Socrates in order to let users converse with those great minds as if they were in the room. Goldberg said he can see an election application, too.

“You could imagine that you take every record you have of everything that Donald Trump’s ever said, and you put it in [a chatbot], and you get a sense of what it’s like to ask him a question," he said.

The excitement around chatbots has reached such heights in Silicon Valley in recent months that there's been some blowback, with some saying the buzz is premature. “It got really overhyped, very very quickly,” said David Marcus, Facebook’s vice president of messaging products, admitted recently.

But for those in American politics trying to figure out ways to reach increasingly mobile voters, it’s seemingly worth wading through the hype.

“In the whole world of millennials, nobody has a telephone, but [Facebook] Messenger has mass distribution,” said Scott Asen, one of the co-creators of HillYEAH!, the pro-Clinton chatbot. "That's a huge number of people who are tough to get to the polls. This is a way of getting to them."

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