Glitchy Facebook bots show tech in early stages

SAN FRANCISCO -- One of the chatbots Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg featured in his widely watched keynote is glitchy. And its developers know it. Poncho, the digital cat that gives sassy weather updates, won't tell me the weather or answer my questions. When asked to change the time it will deliver a forecast, it responds: "Sorry, you're going to have to say that again in Cat. When asked again specifically for the cat to tell the weather at 7 a.m., it changes the alert settings to 6 p.m. But it's stumped by others that seem pretty clear. Sam Mandel, CEO of the bot-developer behind Poncho, was holed up in an Airbnb rental in San Francisco's Richmond district two days after Zuckerberg's keynote here, trying to fix it with his team. "There are definitely some rough edges," he said by phone. "We had so much traffic, more than expected." An uneven user experience for some of Facebook Messenger's chatbots, the artificial intelligence-powered programs designed to simulate human conversation with businesses, is a cold dose of reality after the fanfare of Facebook's big developers conference here last week. "We think you should message a business just the way you would message a friend," Zuckerberg told attendees at the F8 conference. Messenger chatbots have the possibility of reaping billions in ad revenue for Facebook, analysts say. To smartphone users that have grown accustomed to tapping apps to hail an Uber or book a restaurant, the new conversational commerce holds the potential to reshape our everyday tech interactions into more personalized experiences. Rather than try to work a drop-down menu on a shopping app or mobile browser, you would chat with a chatbot concierge about size, price and design for a pair of shoes, for instance. CNN's bot is one of about thirty launched this week to work within Facebook's Messenger. But the vision and reality don't match yet, early attempts to use a few of the chatbots featured at F8 show. When I asked CNN's bot to tell me news about Facebook, it responded with a " \_(?)_/ " -- literally. To start our conversation, I texted the bot "Hi" and in return, it immediately started sending me daily news roundups with a variety of stories where I had the option to read or get a shortened summary. Spring, a shopping concierge bot, took minutes to respond. We'll be with you shortly."