BotXperts asked — with David Pichsenmeister of oratio
This is the third interview of a series of interviews I’m doing with 10 experts of the worldwide bot scene. These interviews are part of my research which aims to find guidelines for designing messenger bots. If you want to read more about what I do and why you can do it in my previous article. You can also read the previous interviews with:
David Pichsenmeister & oratio
David has founded oratio together with Bernhard in Vienna two years ago. This was also the beginning of his bot career and now he’s often called “The Bot Father”.
Oratio enables businesses to communicate with their customers automatized but also personally via different platforms like WhatsApp or Messenger. With that oratio was the first company in Austria that opened up all those channels to businesses in an easy way. In those two years they gatherer a lot of knowledge about messaging and bots, have published many articles on their blog to also share that knowledge with the whole community. Besides that they also organized the first Austrian bot conference, Chatbot Conf, last year which is also going to happen in October this year. Oratio’s services are now used by over 130 companies from the US, Latin America, South America, Europe, South East Asia, Russia and South Africa.
Bot Development
Which problems did you face while developing bots?
None.
What kind of problems do you see in the interaction between people and bots?
The whole thing is relatively new and there are hardly any best practices. Also I think that there are still features missing for messaging networks and I see a need for standards for messaging like we have the W3C for the Web. I guess in 1–2 years bots will become more consistent and standardized in a way it happened with apps before. For touch interfaces we have a lot of patterns for example for navigation or states and design guidelines. I see this coming for bots as well in the future.
What have you improved on your bots since the release?
A lot.
The Future of Bots
How do you see the future of bots?
Messenger apps are very popular and I guess the most used apps on smartphones. If you look at the Internet population which is about 3.5 billion people and the monthly active users of WhatsApp (1.2 billion), Messenger (1.1 billion) and WeChat (0.8 billion) and assume that users don’t overlap you’ll see that every Internet user is at least active in one messenger app a month. In the next three years 0.5 billion people will go online and most of them will use smartphones to do so. There is also a trend of communicating online. Mainly via messenger services. Therefore these services will develop to platforms.
What has to be improved so bots can work better?
It depends on where you look at. In emerging markets like South East Asia, Africa or Latin America bots are already accepted. In these countries a lot of people use voice bots and apps like m-pesa, WeChat and LINE are very common. This is mostly because these countries are mobile-first.
In the US messenger apps just started to become popular. At the moment SMS is still the most used messaging form.
In other countries like Europe or South America WhatApp is kind of mainstream but what is missing there is an official interface.
Bots will replace websites
What do you think about this statement?
I agree, especially if you refer it to the main usage of users. Sure apps will still exist like we now have both, desktop apps and web apps. But I think the main usage will shift to already existing ecosystems or platforms like Facebook Messenger. Especially the young generation or people from emerging markets (mobile-first audience) will do so.
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