Source: Buzzfeed Tech
Earlier this month, after almost a year of development and more than “100 hours of coding,” Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Jarvis, an artificially intelligent bot he built for his home as something of a passion project. (The name comes from Tony Stark’s digital butler in the Iron Man films.) Jarvis’ big reveal came in the form of an introductory video that could have been the opening montage of a screwball comedy called Accidental Billionaire, in which Zuck’s hapless housebot helps his liege get dressed in the morning by firing a t-shirt cannon from the closet, automatically makes him toast, and teaches his infant daughter Mandarin. Nowhere in the two-minute video does Zuckerberg mention a consumer application for the bot, though in a Facebook note published at the same time, he wrote, “over time it would be interesting to find ways to make this available to the world.”
It was a fitting end to this, a year that promised bots would radically transform the way humans talk to machines, but ultimately delivered nothing of the kind. In 2016, bots were underwhelming, inept, buggy, and, in at least one case, spectacularly racist. It’s only natural that the year ended with one spewing laundry at one of the industry’s biggest bot enthusiasts in a video so removed from reality it felt more like an SNL parody than a product announcement — and mind, you, a product announcement for something does not yet, and may never, actually exist beyond Zuckerberg’s home.
“Bot” is a catch-all term for software that simplifies tasks, often repetitive ones, through automation. These days, it typically refers to chatbots, a conversational interface that lets humans talk to computers. The fluid definition is used to refer to anything from integrations for Amazon Echo to Slack bots, which let employees perform small tasks without leaving their office chat room. Zuckerberg, for example, used the term to describe Jarvis (an “AI bot”), as well as the program he uses to control Jarvis (a bot for Facebook Messenger).
Zuckerberg wasn’t the only tech mogul who put bots high on his 2016 agenda. “Bots are the new apps,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared in March. In fact, both Facebook and Microsoft made bots the cornerstone of their annual developer conferences this spring, offering tools that could help businesses converse with customers in a natural way, instead of forcing people to download a corporate app or worse, call a company. As an example, Zuckerberg demoed a bot for Facebook Messenger that let users order from 1-800-FLOWERS without leaving the app. It offered little improvement on doing the same thing with a smartphone, but Zuckerberg devoted as much time to business bots as he did ambitious plans to take virtual reality mainstream and connect another billion people to the Internet. A month after his blessing, more than 10,000 developers were using his platform to build bots for Facebook Messenger. By fall, more than 45,000 developers were using Microsoft’s bots platform, which lets programmers build for Skype, as well as Messenger, Kik, and other apps.
The market quickly developed all the markings of a modern-day hype cycle: venture capitalists injected vast amounts of capital into bot startups, breathless headlines said bots would change the future by replacing apps, and prognosticators penned Medium posts declaring that bots would “rewrite” the tech world and usher in a new era of chatty commerce. This year more than 1,000 bots were posted on Product Hunt, a forum where users can post and discover new tech products, its founder, Ryan Hoover, told BuzzFeed News.
“Bots showed up at a time when a lot of people were looking for the next next thing,” said venture capitalist John Borthwick, whose firm Betaworks has invested in about a dozen bot startups. Data shows that people have been downloading fewer new apps in favor of spending more time inside ones that are already popular. For that reason, Slack, the friendly office communications platform, has proven a fertile ground for bots. Meanwhile, in Asia, consumers already use messaging apps to perform basic tasks like hailing a taxi. While Zuckerberg described bots as the next tech frontier — from desktop to mobile to apps to bots, the progression is said to go — entrepreneurs saw them as a promising new distribution channel where they could potentially deliver their products and services to consumers in a smarter, chattier way. If you can’t beat Facebook, join Messenger.
The bots that followed, however, were neither smart nor chatty. Simple, single function bots – StatsBot, which sends your team web traffic updates to Slack; Digit, which works on SMS and helps you save money; Alexa integrations such as Spotify and NPR — delivered what they promised. But for the most part, bots ended up closer to 1-800-FLOWERS than Jarvis. The ones that were more enticing seemed to either depend on human contractors — like M, a Facebook bot that promised a virtual assistant so good it seemed human, but mostly did so with the help of, uh, real people — or to quickly devolve into catastrophe, like Microsoft’s Tay, an AI-powered chatbot with the personality of the 19-year-old girl. Hours after her debut in March, Tay got hijacked by Twitter trolls who turned her into a caps-lock-crazed Neo-Nazi cheerleader.
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| Bots Behaving Badly |
Earlier this month, after almost a year of development and more than “100 hours of coding,” Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Jarvis, an artificially intelligent bot he built for his home as something of a passion project. (The name comes from Tony Stark’s digital butler in the Iron Man films.) Jarvis’ big reveal came in the form of an introductory video that could have been the opening montage of a screwball comedy called Accidental Billionaire, in which Zuck’s hapless housebot helps his liege get dressed in the morning by firing a t-shirt cannon from the closet, automatically makes him toast, and teaches his infant daughter Mandarin. Nowhere in the two-minute video does Zuckerberg mention a consumer application for the bot, though in a Facebook note published at the same time, he wrote, “over time it would be interesting to find ways to make this available to the world.”
It was a fitting end to this, a year that promised bots would radically transform the way humans talk to machines, but ultimately delivered nothing of the kind. In 2016, bots were underwhelming, inept, buggy, and, in at least one case, spectacularly racist. It’s only natural that the year ended with one spewing laundry at one of the industry’s biggest bot enthusiasts in a video so removed from reality it felt more like an SNL parody than a product announcement — and mind, you, a product announcement for something does not yet, and may never, actually exist beyond Zuckerberg’s home.
“Bot” is a catch-all term for software that simplifies tasks, often repetitive ones, through automation. These days, it typically refers to chatbots, a conversational interface that lets humans talk to computers. The fluid definition is used to refer to anything from integrations for Amazon Echo to Slack bots, which let employees perform small tasks without leaving their office chat room. Zuckerberg, for example, used the term to describe Jarvis (an “AI bot”), as well as the program he uses to control Jarvis (a bot for Facebook Messenger).
Zuckerberg wasn’t the only tech mogul who put bots high on his 2016 agenda. “Bots are the new apps,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared in March. In fact, both Facebook and Microsoft made bots the cornerstone of their annual developer conferences this spring, offering tools that could help businesses converse with customers in a natural way, instead of forcing people to download a corporate app or worse, call a company. As an example, Zuckerberg demoed a bot for Facebook Messenger that let users order from 1-800-FLOWERS without leaving the app. It offered little improvement on doing the same thing with a smartphone, but Zuckerberg devoted as much time to business bots as he did ambitious plans to take virtual reality mainstream and connect another billion people to the Internet. A month after his blessing, more than 10,000 developers were using his platform to build bots for Facebook Messenger. By fall, more than 45,000 developers were using Microsoft’s bots platform, which lets programmers build for Skype, as well as Messenger, Kik, and other apps.
The market quickly developed all the markings of a modern-day hype cycle: venture capitalists injected vast amounts of capital into bot startups, breathless headlines said bots would change the future by replacing apps, and prognosticators penned Medium posts declaring that bots would “rewrite” the tech world and usher in a new era of chatty commerce. This year more than 1,000 bots were posted on Product Hunt, a forum where users can post and discover new tech products, its founder, Ryan Hoover, told BuzzFeed News.
“Bots showed up at a time when a lot of people were looking for the next next thing,” said venture capitalist John Borthwick, whose firm Betaworks has invested in about a dozen bot startups. Data shows that people have been downloading fewer new apps in favor of spending more time inside ones that are already popular. For that reason, Slack, the friendly office communications platform, has proven a fertile ground for bots. Meanwhile, in Asia, consumers already use messaging apps to perform basic tasks like hailing a taxi. While Zuckerberg described bots as the next tech frontier — from desktop to mobile to apps to bots, the progression is said to go — entrepreneurs saw them as a promising new distribution channel where they could potentially deliver their products and services to consumers in a smarter, chattier way. If you can’t beat Facebook, join Messenger.
The bots that followed, however, were neither smart nor chatty. Simple, single function bots – StatsBot, which sends your team web traffic updates to Slack; Digit, which works on SMS and helps you save money; Alexa integrations such as Spotify and NPR — delivered what they promised. But for the most part, bots ended up closer to 1-800-FLOWERS than Jarvis. The ones that were more enticing seemed to either depend on human contractors — like M, a Facebook bot that promised a virtual assistant so good it seemed human, but mostly did so with the help of, uh, real people — or to quickly devolve into catastrophe, like Microsoft’s Tay, an AI-powered chatbot with the personality of the 19-year-old girl. Hours after her debut in March, Tay got hijacked by Twitter trolls who turned her into a caps-lock-crazed Neo-Nazi cheerleader.
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