3 trends driving the chatbot revolution

Facebook's big announcement at its annual F8 Developer conference, was to make Messenger, its 900-million-user messaging app into a full-fledged platform that allows businesses to communicate with users via chatbots. On the surface, that sounds like a standard, if very ambitious, product announcement, taking an already successful product to the next level. But it's a lot more than that, and it's worth looking into the three intersecting trends rolled into this one announcement to understand why it's a big deal, and why the the chatter around chatbots is everywhere. What we quaintly call "phones" aren't used much for phone calls these days. In fact, measured by actual usage, they're messaging devices; for most users, messaging (texting and all of its more advanced variants) is the core function of the phone, the place they're focused on most of the time.