On bots, language and making technology disappear

Elizabeth McGuane is lead content designer at Intercom. This year, the buzzword is without question bots. As with anything we build, we give bots names. They come pre-personified and ready for us to start that human-computer relationship, just like HAL 9000 or Her: there's Siri in our iPhones, Alexa in Amazon's Echo and there's even Facebook Messenger's PSL (Pumpkin Spice Latte) Bot. A name can be a way of expressing trust in an object -- or expressing control over it.