{"id":295447,"date":"2017-02-18T09:53:06","date_gmt":"2017-02-18T09:53:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=295447"},"modified":"2017-02-18T09:53:06","modified_gmt":"2017-02-18T09:53:06","slug":"the-boy-behind-facebooks-best-chatbot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=295447","title":{"rendered":"The boy behind Facebook’s best chatbot"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been nearly a year since Microsoft’s Satya Nadella proclaimed “bots are the new apps”.<\/p>\n

Yet despite the promise of a revolution in how we interact with services and companies online, progress has been utterly miserable – the vast majority of chat bots are gimmicky, pointless or just flat out broken.<\/p>\n

But this week I was given great cause for optimism, in the form of Alec Jones, a 14-year-old from Victoria, Canada.<\/p>\n

For the past six months, Alec been working on Christopher Bot, a chatbot that helps students keep track of homework they’ve been given over the course of a week.<\/p>\n

To set things up, a student shares his or her schedule with Christopher Bot, and from then on it will send a quick message at the end of each lesson asking if any homework had been set.<\/p>\n

“Do you have homework for maths?” it asked 30-year-old me pretending to be a child for the sake of this piece.<\/p>\n

“Yes!” I replied.<\/p>\n

“Your teacher needs to chill out on the homework,” came the auto-response, adding, “what homework do you have?”<\/p>\n

“Algebra :-(”<\/p>\n

“Ok, got it.”<\/p>\n

\n

\"The
The chat bot takes answers in from messages and adds it to a homework schedule<\/figcaption><\/figure>
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Through this interface, I’m able easily insert “algebra” – urgh – into a weekly schedule that I can then refer back to at any point to see what I need to get done.<\/p>\n

Once I complete a piece of homework, I tell Christopher Bot, and it congratulates me, automatically removing the homework from my list of things to do. The best bit? The bot keeps quiet during the holidays.<\/p>\n

Chat bot promise<\/strong><\/p>\n

What makes me so impressed by this is that, of all the experiments I’ve seen so far, it is the first time a chatbot has genuinely been the best way to tackle a problem.<\/p>\n

Other chat bots are a lesser experience of something else. The CNN news chatbot, for example, is worse at giving you the news than any of CNN\u2019s other products.<\/p>\n

And popular weather bot Poncho, while cute and well-branded, has a habit of telling me it’s about to rain five minutes after water started falling on my head.<\/p>\n

But Christopher Bot shows the potential for producing a service that is completely at home within chat – removing the need for students to access some extra tool to keep track of what needs doing, and interacting in a way that (slightly) lessens the unavoidable chore of homework.<\/p>\n

“I wanted it to not just sound like a robot,” Alec told me.<\/p>\n

“I wanted it to sound kind of like my friends would. If you get homework, everyone always just shakes their heads and says ‘that sucks’.”<\/p>\n

And it does this within an app his friends are already likely using (though perhaps Snapchat would be a more useful place for it, one day).<\/p>\n

In short, it’s a product those companies banking on chatbots being a winner should seek to emulate.<\/p>\n

Allo allo<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s extremely difficult, for now, to measure the success of chatbots. Ad industry magazine AdAge noted that: “Bot analytics and bot-building software companies all have shortcomings, largely because this technology is in its infancy.<\/p>\n

“Few benchmarks exist, especially when trying to compare data across platforms.”<\/p>\n

So without data, we can’t say what’s working just yet – though there are some clues to what isn’t.<\/p>\n

Google’s AI-powered messaging app Allo, since being launched to much fanfare last year, has failed to make even a minor dent in a messaging app market dominated by Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Allo\"
Google’s artificial-intelligence-enhanced chat app runs on Android and iOS<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n

And that’s because there’s no compelling reason to bother with Allo. None of its features – like asking it for directions – provide enough of a benefit beyond what you’d get from just tapping in your request the “old fashioned” way. Users have an incredibly short fuse for chat bots not working exactly as we expect.<\/p>\n

Most big companies are missing the point, Alec told me. “There are a lot of chat bots made by these big companies that are supposed to help you interact with their service more and give you more functionality,” he said.<\/p>\n

“But it feels like they just saw this new platform, bots, and thought ‘oh that’s cool, people are looking at these now, let’s build a bot’.<\/p>\n

“It feels like they’ve just made a compromised version of what they’re actually trying to build.”<\/p>\n

Usefulness<\/strong><\/p>\n

Earlier this week, Alec’s bot was shared on Product Hunt, a website I profiled recently, where it gained rave reviews and a fair share of feature requests.<\/p>\n

“You’re solving a problem many students have,” read one reply.<\/p>\n

“Fellow 14 year old here,” began another. “Great job man! That’s sick that you\u2019re my age and made such a cool and useful product. Awesome!”<\/p>\n

Like any good developer, Alec has aspirations to build on the what he\u2019s made – he wants to make it work for people in the working world, too.<\/p>\n

But first he feels Facebook and others must do more to prove the usefuless of chatbots to people.<\/p>\n

“I think that the real problem is that not enough people on Facebook who aren’t ‘techies’ don’t know what a bot is, and then they don’t use it. More people need to know what a bot is,” he said.<\/p>\n

When Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage in front of his developers last year, he said he was opening up Messenger so that anybody could make great apps. I bet he didn\u2019t think it would be a 14-year-old who would show him how it\u2019s done.<\/p>\n

–<\/p>\n

Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been nearly a year since Microsoft’s Satya Nadella proclaimed “bots are the new apps”. Yet despite the promise of a revolution in how we interact with services and companies online, progress has been utterly miserable – the vast majority of chat bots are gimmicky, pointless or just flat out broken. But this week I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[106],"tags":[4215,4216,339,3],"class_list":["post-295447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-14-year-old-boy","tag-chatbot","tag-facebook","tag-ghana-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=295447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=295447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=295447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=295447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}