Bots are about to take over the world … but they just want to tell you the weather

By Luria Petrucci May 18, 2016

Facebook recently made a big deal about their new Messenger Bots, and they’re not the only ones. Bots are about to take over the world. Or… at least our social world.

Bots are apps that can respond to you through natural language input, be it speech or text. For example, you can start chatting to a CNN bot and get headlines about the topics you’re interested in. Start a conversation with a weather app and get important weather updates as you need them. Microsoft has also prioritized bots, and hopes that developers will start integrating them into Windows Universal Platform applications.

The idea is that we can have automated “conversations” in order to get information we want and need quickly, and without any human interaction.

On one hand, this is great. We don’t have to bother anyone to accomplish what we want. On the other hand, this can potentially be detrimental to our human interaction. Bots respond immediately. Are we setting ourselves up to hate interacting with a real person who doesn’t respond quickly? Are we setting ourselves up for our bosses to expect an immediate response from us when we’re trying to spend time with our family? We’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

So, should you be diving into the world of bots? If you’re usually an early adopter, sure. Just be ready for some hiccups. If you like things to just work then I’d wait on any Facebook Messenger bots for a while. You’d be safe getting a weather bot from Kik or checking out their Kik Bot Store to see if anything piques your interest.

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