Why The First Wave of Chat Bots Are a Bit of a Mess

If you spent any amount of time online in the past few days, you'll have noticed plenty of chatter about chat bots, tiny little computer programs that live inside messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, Skype, or Slack that are designed to spit out useful bits of data like weather forecasts or the latest headlines using an interface--chat!--that requires little or no training to understand. It's a nice idea, maybe, but you know what's the single most obvious thing to me in the days since Mark Zuckerberg took the stage in San Francisco to proclaim the beginning of the Chat Bot Era? Brands and developers are feverishly trying to figure out in real time, right before our very eyes, where this whole chat bot thing is going. "There's no question that bots are more suited for some kinds of interactions than others," Sam Mandel, CEO of weather app Poncho, which released a weather bot for Facebook Messenger earlier this week, told Motherboard. "We think of it as really a conversation: When we built Poncho we wanted him to be your friend, and that's why we think weather is just a great starting point in the sense that that's a conversation that everyone has with their friends." Unlike my friends, however, Poncho doesn't quite understand the nuances of the Attitude Era: As Mandel explains it, Poncho decided to go all-in with a Facebook Messenger bot because people "have already voted with their time."