Messengers now have an incredible reach and in 2015 messaging apps have overtaken social networks to become the dominant platforms on mobile phones. Chatbots will be one of the next big evolutions of mobile messengers and they are changing the way how users interact with a service, through natural language. People are downloading fewer apps, and bots within messengers are quickly becoming a new way to enrich these platforms with context from outside. Messengers like WeChat already showed how to build a truly mobile platform with a pioneering model of "apps within an app". Adding a chatbot has a way lower barrier for users, since there’s no need to go to an appstore and download an app, it can just be added as a contact. This is super effective for lower-frequency but important services like managing credit card statements, utility bills or recurring shop orders. For these use cases, chatbots are a perfect fit since adding the bot is extremely lightweight instead of downloading a separate native full-featured apps.
Chatbots unify the UI and the interaction with a service even more than mobile apps do. They are easier to use and learnings can be transferred from one to the other. Users do not have to learn the UI from scratch because they are already familiar with the core UI and interaction concepts from chatting with other people.
14. David Pichsenmeister
@3x14159265
“Chat apps will come to be thought of as the new
browsers; bots will be the new websites. This is
the beginning of a new Internet.”
Ted Livingston, Founder of Kik