How Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence Are Evolving the Digital/Social Experience

Digital engagement is once again shifting, as we can see from the main discussions at Facebook's F8 conference this week about the new release of Messenger and its smart chatbots, or when we look at what's happening with popular team messaging services like Slack, which is being "overrun by friendly, wonderful bots." While bots seem like a minor improvement to digital user experience, some believe -- including myself -- that a combination of today's latest technologies will transform this what's-old-is-new-again technology into a major new force in contemporary digital experience and social engagement. Over the last couple of years, conversing in everyday language with our digital devices has become relatively commonplace with the advent of widely used digital concierge services like Siri, Google Now, and Amazon Echo. Known more formally as'conversational user experiences (UXs)', this dialogue-based interaction model actually has quite a long history going way back to command-line programs like Eliza and Zork (both of which yours truly spent far too much time with when younger), the first commercial expert systems in the 1980s, IRC bots, and other early examples. While there's always been an assumption that bots had a bit code behind them with a little situated intelligence -- from performing simple services like scheduling reminders via IM all the way up to the first textual AI-based systems such as MYCIN for helping doctors diagnose infections -- most conversational interfaces tend to be relatively simple affairs with a little bit of basic natural language processing connected to a decision tree.