For those of us in the tech community the word “bot” became increasingly ubiquitous throughout 2016. Last year was loudly proclaimed, “The Year of the Chatbot”, “The Bot Revolution”, “The Bots Coming Out Party”. According to more than a few tech journalists, it seemed inevitable all the apps we use daily were doomed and everyone including your boyfriend, fiancé, uncle, milkman (do those still exist?) and boss would be chatting away with AI powered machines servicing businesses.
Uuummmm… well that didn’t exactly happen.
What did happen however may be more interesting. The “Chatbot Gold Rush” did not come to fruition, but those inventors of the modern equivalents to Picks & Shovels made a ton of headway in 2016. Frameworks for building conversational applications sprang up nearly every week in the first quarter of the year. As did natural language tools. Facebook rolled out at least 3 quality platform updates to provide better UX. Communities of builders came together to share ideas, debate and drink insane amounts of beer weekly.
Most major advancements for conversational commerce have certainly been in infrastructure, user experience and community. But mass adoption by everyday lay-people, the “killer app” of bots, it just hasn’t materialized. Most normal people are simply still not familiar or comfortable with “bots”.
This is a major reason I avoid the word altogether. The term “bot” has been around for some time now. Originally it was Chatterbot, a relatively harmless but equally useless pretend conversation. Then there were those nasty spambots, Twitterbots, ticket-bots, all not cool. Robots are a thing. So, it’s a confusing term and not consumer-centric. After building one myself, I don’t even know definitively what a “bot” is!
Coup is not a bot… not in my mind at least. It is an app for Facebook Messenger, and maybe other conversational platforms in the future.
Sure a lot of the tools used to create Coup were designed to make “chatbots”, but keeping a laser focus on a positive end-customer experience meant using these tools to create something beyond a “chatbot”. Something that provides a seamless experience, not an exasperating dialogue.
Give it a try. I expect you will feel what I’m saying. It’s all by design.
-jc