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 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":[],"categories":[106],"tags":[4215,4216,339,3],"yoast_head":"\n![\"The](\"http:\/\/ichef-1.bbci.co.uk\/news\/624\/cpsprodpb\/1474F\/production\/_94719738_whatsubject.jpg\")
![\"Allo\"](\"http:\/\/ichef-1.bbci.co.uk\/news\/624\/cpsprodpb\/611E\/production\/_91326842_9a94ae17-ff1b-456d-b082-190910c1dffb.jpg\")