Chat bots, conversation and AI as an interface
Are we still building websites if we’re using chat bots to communicate our messaging? My good friend Al believes that bots are the way of the future, and with many company’s jumping on the bandwagon it’s becoming more difficult to argue with that idea. At the end of the day the websites that we build are there to provide content or services to our users however and whenever they want to use them. In the same way that we syndicate our content through RSS feeds to RSS Readers, or through Googles Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), or the Facebook Instant Articles now open for everyone… the same process of syndicating our content or services into a bot framework interface can be followed. I LOVE the approach that City Mapper have taken with their GoBot, definitely check it out.
One way to look at any given AI problem, in the crudest terms, is to ask whether solving this needs ‘general AI’ or whether your domain is narrow enough and your solution broad and flexible enough that you can deal with a wide enough percentage of potential scenarios without having HAL 9000. That is, we’re clearly pretty close to making a car that can handle highway driving with no human input, since the range of possible events is pretty small, but is driving in central Rome or Moscow an entirely different matter that needs an entirely different level of decision-making? What does that hand gesture mean?
An excerpt from Chat bots, conversation and AI as an interface
