Facebook chatbots: Taking away humanness from our conversations?

A little over a decade ago, a sophomore at Harvard University – Mark Zuckerberg – wrote some lines of code to create what became the world’s favourite social network. Over the decade has gone by and things have changed. Facebook is no longer a college student’s project. It had an IPO and is now worth billions. With several more at stake. And is now accountable to some very powerful investors. In retrospect, it does make sense. Ever since its IPO in May 2012, Facebook has been betting big on advertising. Revenues from Facebook advertising has been going strong for Facebook, unlike Twitter which is going through its own set of challenges. However, at this year’s F8 conference, Facebook made a set of announcements. The most important among them was around chatbots. This is surprising on many fronts. First, Facebook was about bring people together and initiating conversations. What happened to giving brands a face to connect with customers? In fact, a very popular industry term is conversations. Add to it sentiment. Whether the nature of conversations around a brand is positive or negative is the single largest peg upon which the digital marketing industry exists. In such an age where humanness is key to better engagement, Facebook seems to have initiated a new trend – of enabling brands to implement chatbots to communicate with users. Effectively, you could simply chat with your airline’s chatbot to clarify doubts you may have about your scheduled flight later in the day, rather than staying on a wait over a phone call. That’s a welcome development. But again, would a brand prefer having a bot engage with its customers? How then, could a bot possibly bring people together? Something like what IVRS was in the ’90s? Technology does simplify and scale things up. But what brands would need to be careful about is the deepening of customer relationship. Any marketer would agree that’s foremost priority. It’s interesting that just a couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced it was going a similar direction. And in terms of inspiration, several mentions of WeChat were made. Everyone seemed to look East to highlight how chatbots are relatively big in China. Automated conversations seem to work for users in the world’s most populated market. So if Microsoft, and now Facebook, are heading the chatbot way, and in fact, refer to chatbots as the next leap of innovations then there’s much to ponder over. What happens to human to human conversation? The irony of a social network made to connect humans to other humans, is now bringing about a wave of algorithms to determine conversations? That somehow doesn’t feel too good. We’ve known AI is a field of active interest for at least a couple of decades, although it has existed as a term for much longer. But when all your favourite brands hop on to the AI bandwagon, you ask yourself: What if you just want to pick up the phone and speak to someone when you need to? Or would you need to have Facebook installed on your mobile phone just because the pizza you ordered didn’t arrive? During Build 2016, that’s exactly what Microsoft demoed. Instead of going to the website of Domino’s Pizza, you could simply chat with its chatbot. It all seemed exciting, till you realise that this is going to be a significant technology trend. Microsoft calls its offering the Bot Framework. It intends to help developers create chatbots, and integrate them with applications such as Skype, email, or just about any web service. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella puts it: https://twitter.com/nashpd/status/715228631170088961 This is evidently the beginning of a new chapter of intelligence. Apple, Google – you’re next! Could 2016 possibly trigger the ‘rise of the bots’?