Bot: Change your APP or even your girlfriend.

Line also announced the launch of chat bots. In the future, Line will no longer be just a software for you and your sister to sell cute expressions. It can also help you take a taxi and make an appointment, making it easier for you to snuggle up with your sister. (Generally speaking, M introduced by Facebook is very similar. )

Line used to make money mainly by selling stickers and advertisements. After the launch of the chat bot, Line can obviously add another channel to make money. (I was in pain after Line was hit by a wall. )

Communication applications have laid out BOTs, and the ultimate motivation is to turn their products into an application portal that collects a lot of traffic, and use BOT to replace apps with various functions in users' mobile phones. Many people in the industry predict that the Bot era is coming.

What is Bot?

Bot, from the robot. Basically, Bot is a kind of software that can trigger some actions. Recently, we often talk about "chat bots". You think this robot looks familiar, right? Yes, Microsoft Cortana, Apple Siri and Google Now all fall into this category.

Bot can know what you want to do and respond dynamically. Some robots will have their own applications, while others are just built into Slack, Facebook and other information channels. Some robots can be accessed using voice devices, such as Amazon Echo.

Phil Libin, before Evernote, thinks that the best Bot can integrate various interactive ways. Users can talk to Bot in the most natural way, and it can reply to you in the most efficient way. Not Turing test, but R2D2. Robots don't have to pretend to be human, as long as they can interact with users quickly and conveniently. Any application that requires collaboration, communication, consumption, organization, etc. It may become a robot.

R2D2 in Star Wars

The robot is on fire.

Bot has suddenly become very popular recently, because some big companies have made some big moves.

Facebook released the developer platform Messenger Platform (beta) at the F8 developer conference. Bot replaces the existing UI with dialogue. When users interact with Bot, they don't need to click and slide, but only need to talk to it. Robots that have been running on the Messenger platform include Poncho, 1-800-Flowers to check the weather and CNN to book flowers.

Facebook believes that Bot has the potential to become the main tool for enterprises to communicate with customers. Using Bot platform and manual customer service at the same time will reduce the labor cost of enterprises. If users welcome Bot, it will become a new channel for e-commerce sales, customer support and even media.

In addition to the Messenger platform, the conference also announced developer tools such as API, which can help developers develop Bot on Messenger applications or widgets on the Messenger website.

Microsoft has made a bet on Bot. Last month, Microsoft Build announced the Bot platform. Following Tay, a chat robot besieged by netizens for publishing "racist remarks" on the Internet, Microsoft released an artificial intelligence CpationBot. CpationBot can identify the content of photos uploaded by users and automatically generate some descriptions (that is, "look at pictures and talk").

It performs well in most cases, such as recognizing kittens and molds at a glance.

But it did not recognize Hitler and refused to identify bin Laden.

Other companies are also pouring into this wave. For example, Slack set up an $80 million fund to help develop Bot and other applications on its platform. Phil Libin just mentioned that he recently invested in a robot development startup called Begin. China Netease held the Netease Seven Fish Conference to provide customer service assistants for enterprises based on artificial intelligence and natural language processing.

There are also some small companies that use this Bot momentum to gain popularity. They are sandwiched between platforms and service providers to provide technical support for developing Bot.

What Bot means is ...

There is no doubt that Bot was born on demand. The supply and demand of information on the Internet have long been unbalanced, and the demand for information processing has exceeded the limits of human beings. We must rely on Bot to break through the information explosion. The influence of Bot development will be enormous.

At present, we all need to get applications through App Store and Google Play, but in the future, when Bot services become popular, we only need to open IM software to find the services we need. So, will Microsoft and Facebook replace Apple and Google in the future? Guess, I can't say. )

Operation diagram of Bot (picture from Verge)

Bot can replace a large part of the work of "customer service" and "assistant". Intelligence itself means liberating people's hands, but on the other hand, it also means making some professions disappear completely.

The hero in "She" fell in love with the OS that he chatted with every day.

The robot woman who cheated human beings in Mechanical Discipline.

In the popular movies "She" and "Mechanical Ji" in the past two years, we will find that our desire for interpersonal relationships is growing in an era when everyone is relatively independent. If we can't communicate with people, we can also communicate with machines. Man-machine relationship is likely to slip into an ambiguous situation, but is this really enough?

In the Internet age, you can't predict anything.