There are hundreds of social networks online and one of the most popular is Facebook, a social network that owes its success to the number of conventional people using it. By conventional people I mean middle to late adopters. I mean users that would never consider social networks. Most people are using Facebook because it is the networks their friends use. Most people do not join social networks out of curiousity.
For instance, people already message businesses via their pages on Facebook, but need to wait for a reply "” what Zuckerberg described as "latency."
If I message a company I want a human to respond rather than a bot. The whole point of an IM is to establish a personal connection with a business. The questions are usually those that require a human to respond. If the question was a generic one that a database or FAQ could hold the answer to then I would prefer to use that database or FAQ. Why would businesses want to automate customer relations.
To accomplish this, Zuckerberg sees artificial intelligence as playing a central role in harvesting and mining the conversations between businesses and Messenger’s 900 million monthly active users. "We’re going to build AI to help automate responses" for users, he said.
I ask myself why someone would want to speak to a bot rather than a person. Who would prefer a bot to an FAQ or quick search on business websites. Is the chat bot aimed towards users like me? Am I the group that they are trying to reach. The answer is probably not. I believe that this tech is being developed for less computer savvy users. This technology is being developed for people who do not want to use applications or websites. I can see how chat bots could help make bookings for restaurants, flights and other services. I can imagine the interaction being like this. “I’d like to book a hotel in Geneva near the old town from the 12th to the 14th of June in a 5 star hotel”. The information would be processed and you’d get a few options and prices. Artificial intelligence would recognise the bits of information that are provided and deliver appropriate results. Another example would be for the booking of seats for a film screening. “i’d like two places for this film at that time”. Such text based interactions would greatly reduce the need for bandwidth and could speed up generic requests and queries. In such interactions there is no need for a human and it bypasses the need for a separate app. We already have and use this technology for Google Calendars so we are in a familiar context. The question is how flexible AI can become. Could it help with the ordering of books or other products? If we have a shopping list could we use instant messaging to send it to a specific shop and have them deliver the products? If bots are used within this context then it is interesting as it makes certain activities faster.
personal interactions between businesses and people
With the way that Facebook and Twitter try to hijack conversations and reduce peer to peer interactions I worry that Facebook is finding yet another way to remove the human aspect of conversation between businesses and individuals. Businesses cannot farm out customer relations to chat bots and expect a good impression from the users. It’s just another way in which companies and Facebook are de-humanising what is meant to be a social network. I have had fun playing with chat bots for years but this does not mean that I support this move. Facebook and Twitter were relevant only because they connected humans to other humans. The more they push in their current direction the more it motivates me to stay with Google Plus and blogging. If our interactions are seen as revenue streams then we might as well take control of that revenue stream and cut out the middle men. Facebook and Twitter are middlemen. They become irrelevant.