BotXperts asked — with Richard Coates of TheVentury
This is the seventh 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:
Richard Coates & TheVentury
Richard just started his career as Tech Venturer at TheVentury, Austrias first chat bot agency based in the BotsHub Vienna. The last project he was working on was Black Bart GrowthBot, a bot which provides growth hacks to growth hackers that are looking for tips and advice. Right now it is available on Messenger and Telegram but it will be available soon on the web, and other platforms are in the works. It was built with NodeJS and makes use of MySQL.
Bot Development
Which problems did you face while developing bots?
Trying to keep the bot as close to a human interaction as possible, while still guiding the user down a pre-defined script.
What kind of problems do you see in the interaction between people and bots?
Apart from the above tension, there is also the problem of repetitiveness — people asking the same questions of a bot will always receive the same answers, and this is a problem because it means that the bot interaction becomes stale very quickly.
What have you improved on your bots since the release?
Allowing people to silence the Bot / stop them receiving messages when they don’t want to.
The Future of Bots
How do you see the future of bots?
Bots will probably transition to the domain of assistants, rather than interlocutors, and the main way that they will be useful is in group chats, where people can call on a bot to augment their group planning experiences, e.g. booking travel, tickets.
What has to be improved so bots can work better?
People need to understand them better, so that they become more seamless to use, and the science fiction assumptions (that they will become like JARVIS from Iron Man) probably need to change as well (but I’m not sure how we do that!).
Bots will replace websites
What do you think about this statement?
False. Apps didn’t replace websites, but they did replace some websites. Likewise, Bots will replace search-heavy, form-laden websites, since querying them with a bot is much faster than querying them with a text form. However, websites that are very content heavy will not be replaced by Bots.
