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Getting help with voting registration can now be as simple as a quick chat with a bot. The Ad Council

Companies have another set of tools at their disposal to build chatbots. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has begun touting a

Star Trek got it right: In the future, we’ll use computers by talking to them. Google held an event this

Duolingo, the popular free language-learning platform, launched three language “tutors” in its iOS app today, marketing the AI-powered chatbots as a way of helping users learn a new language without having to pay for expensive lessons. Users can text back and forth to practice a new language, giving learners an eternally patient, nonjudgmental, on-demand instructor. Chatbots, the services you interact with via a chat interface like Facebook messenger, have been hailed as the next big thing in tech. People are now using messenger apps more than social media networks, which means app developers are increasingly turning to bots to help their users access a wide range of services. Major companies like Facebook and Microsoft are trying to capitalize on that potential by rolling out platforms that make it easer for developers to build chatbots, and Google made a virtual assistant accessible through chatbot the central feature of its new phone. Despite the hype, chatbots have fallen disappointingly short. Last March, Twitter got Microsoft’s artificial intelligence chatbot “Tay” to come to the dark side in under 24 hours. Tay started the day as a peaceful, human-loving bot and ended up spewing a barrage of racist tweets in a disturbingly short amount of time. Facebook hasn’t had much luck with its bots either, despite Mark Zuckerberg’s mission to build an “AI to answer any question you have.” The Messenger chatbots have been criticized for being terrible conversationalists, prone to long stretches of silence and regurgitating predetermined answers. Duolingo’s chatbots are Renèe the Driver, Chef Roberto, and Officer Ada, with the promise of more characters coming to the app soon. Learners can use them to practice French, Spanish, and German, and more languages will be added according to demand. The bots add a personal touch to Duolingo’s language programs, and they’re powered by AI, so the more you interact with them the smarter they get. Translation is also a very well-defined domain of expertise, meaning these bots are likely to make fewer mistakes than AI aimed at open-ended conversation.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. Chatbots are being touted as the next platform in which businesses will engage with consumers. Because of this, developers must find methods to measure the success of the nascent technology, according to media and marketing firm Topbot’s head of design and engagement Mariya Yao. That’s because existing metrics used to measure app engagement, such as daily active users and session length, aren’t quite efficient at capturing the unique conversational nature of chatbots. For example, session length — used to measure engagement on apps — could be misleading when used for chatbots, since interactions may reach a successful conclusion in a short amount of time.  Instead, developers should follow metrics that more closely align with what a successful chatbot interaction should look like, Yao suggests. For example, since 40% of users only converse with a chatbot once, it makes sense to measure and identify active and engaged users.  Similarly, because the industry is still nascent, many developers are still working out the kinks in an attempt to optimize the user experience. Measuring “confusion triggers,” or incidences in which a bot replies with “I don’t understand,” can help developers identify friction areas that need to be addressed.  Looking ahead, setting standardized metrics for measuring chatbots will be necessary as brands and platforms, like Messenger, begin looking at leveraging the tech to drive monetization through things like ads. The good news is that thanks to the app market, developers are now well-versed in different strategies that go into measuring engagement, which likely means that a standard for chatbots will be set much faster than it was for apps.  Advancements in artificial intelligence, coupled with the proliferation of messaging apps, are fueling the development of chatbots — software programs that use messaging as the interface through which to carry out any number of tasks, from scheduling a meeting, to reporting weather, to helping users buy a pair of shoes.  Foreseeing immense potential, businesses are starting to invest heavily in the burgeoning bot economy. A number of brands and publishers have already deployed bots on messaging and collaboration channels, including HP, 1-800-Flowers, and CNN. While the bot revolution is still in the early phase, many believe 2016 will be the year these conversational interactions take off. Laurie Beaver, research associate for BI Intelligence, Business Insider’s premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on chatbots that explores the growing and disruptive bot landscape by investigating what bots are, how businesses are leveraging them, and where they will have the biggest impact. The report outlines the burgeoning bot ecosystem by segment, looks at companies that offer bot-enabling technology, distribution channels, and some of the key third-party bots already on offer. The report also forecasts the potential annual savings that businesses could realize if chatbots replace some of their customer service and sales reps. Finally, it compares the potential of chatbot monetization on a platform like Facebook Messenger against the iOS App Store and Google Play store. Here are some of the key takeaways: AI has reached a stage in which chatbots can have increasingly engaging and human conversations, allowing businesses to leverage the inexpensive and wide-reaching technology to engage with more consumers. Chatbots are particularly well suited for mobile — perhaps more so than apps. Messaging is at the heart of the mobile experience, as the rapid adoption of chat apps demonstrates. The chatbot ecosystem is already robust, encompassing many different third-party chat bots, native bots, distribution channels, and enabling technology companies.  Chatbots could be lucrative for messaging apps and the developers who build bots for these platforms, similar to how app stores have developed into moneymaking ecosystems.   In full, the report: Breaks down the pros and cons of chatbots. Explains the different ways businesses can access, utilize, and distribute content via chatbots. Forecasts the potential impact chatbots could have for businesses. Looks at the potential barriers that could limit the growth, adoption, and use of chatbots. To get your copy of this invaluable guide, choose one of these options: Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP Purchase the report and download it immediately from our research store. >> BUY THE REPORT The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of chatbots.

 

Executing an effective customer communication strategy can be a challenge for brands today. Many times, exceptional customer service is limited by the capabilities of the service delivery channels: email, social media, intermediaries and call centers to name a few. With an explosion of new communication channels available, finding the right omnichannel approach for companies requires constant reinvention. In the 1990s, IVR or Interactive Voice Response systems were introduced as a way for companies to better manage and automate customer service, provide customers with a way to access information, and save time and money. Today these systems have become so common customers expect to encounter an IVR robot and often dread the experience — as they deal with long hold times, dropped calls, inter-departmental transfers, and inefficient service. Customers today expect to communicate with brands on their own terms, in real-time, via their preferred channels. They’re also more self-reliant and better informed than ever before. From online portals and live chat to social media and mobile messaging, they want control of how they communicate with brands, while also having the ability to self-service. Brands that offer customers a choice of self-service options, while also providing a seamless connected experience when moving between channels, rate the highest in terms of customer satisfaction. In fact, 60 percent of consumers have a more favorable view of a brand if their self-service offering is mobile-responsive, according to Microsoft’s 2015 Global State of Multichannel Customer Service Report, which compiles the views of 4,000 customers from Brazil, Japan, the UK and the US. Today self-service is more common than ever as consumers use their smartphone and mobile apps to conveniently access information, make payments, schedule appointments, book travel, and find answers to customer support questions. And yet the experience is far from perfect — and further reinvention is clearly needed. Service interactions with brands shouldn’t require multiple online searches, waiting on hold with call centers, or a clumsy toggling between apps. These gaps in the customer experience have led brands across industries to tap into mobile messaging in a bigger way as the preferred communication platform for consumers. As brands look to meet the demand of 24/7, real-time customer service, opportunities for intelligent automation with chatbots also become a natural fit. Here are several examples of how brands across industries have reinvented their customer experience by embracing digital self-service, mobile messaging and intelligent automation: With 97 percent of smartphone owners sending and receiving mobile messages on a regular basis (according to the Pew Research Center), brands are meeting customers where they are and reaping the benefits. In fact, the average mobile messaging or SMS campaign is seven-times more effective than an email campaign. As a result, many insurance companies are skipping mobile apps or portals altogether by providing an SMS or mobile messaging system that customers can use to file claims, manage their billing, text for quotes, respond to surveys and receive promotional offers. In the healthcare industry, providers have also tapped into the value of self-service. A survey by 451 Research revealed “87 percent of customers would prefer to use a visual IVR to complete their appointment scheduling requests faster and be able to seamlessly transfer to a live person without having to repeat their information.” Additionally, customers tend to show a higher preference for mobile click-to-chat options, especially when these options reduce hold times, limit the number of times they have to repeat information, and don’t result in being transferred to multiple representatives. Chatbots are already being developed for the healthcare industry and show some promise. One example is the HealthTap chatbot, which responds to users with physician provided answers to their medical questions. The bot shows how live messaging technology can help healthcare providers keep patients happy and to cut down on hospital and office wait times. Financial services are also finding ways to build customer loyalty and enhance the overall customer experience by implementing self-service options. If you think of online banking via a PC as digital banking 1.0, and use of mobile apps to deposit checks and make payments as digital banking 2.0, then the upcoming use of transactional mobile messaging, chatbots and AI could very well be version 3.0. Just as live chat and self-service have become commonplace in online banking, chatbots can help banks automate customer experience through messaging. This is a huge benefit of mobile self-service, where the limitation of screen size makes searching less user-friendly. When done on a secure mobile messaging platform, chatbots can also handle transactions, including balance inquiries and funds-transfers typical of online and mobile banking sessions. Self-service in the travel industry, as with healthcare and financial services, was originally put into place in an effort to cut down on wait times and the number of agents required to assist customers. Today it’s used to avoid lines altogether as passengers use their mobile devices to check in, drop off their bags, board flights, and order in-flight entertainment and meals. Adoption of self-service tools by travelers has been rapid enough that the airline industry expects to have three in every five passengers checking in to airports with their mobile phones by 2018. While airlines have been slow to adopt mobile messaging and chatbots, travel booking sites Kayak, Skyscanner, and Expedia.com have developed and launched their own chatbots to help users research and book hotels, flights, and more all within a single chat session. No matter which industry you look at, the roll out of self-service options and intelligent automation via chatbots stands to redefine the customer experience while also acting as a key differentiator for large brands and enterprises. And delivering a seamless, secure way for customers to message with your brand or businesses is key. Clearly consumers today don’t want to use the same chat app they use for friends for private, business interactions. As a result, adoption of banking, healthcare and insurance on social chat apps has been relatively slow. Likewise most businesses aren’t interested in using a social messaging service such as WhatsApp for commerce — especially given the recent privacy concerns. The future is bright, but continuing reinvention with self-service and intelligent automation is needed to truly deliver on the promise of the conversational web. Title image by Cliff Johnson

Companies have another set of tools at their disposal to build chatbots. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has begun touting a new LiveMessage service that’s aimed at connecting his company’s Service Cloud with messaging services like Facebook Messenger and SMS.   Benioff is pitching the new service as a way to turn messaging apps into a user interface for Salesforce, in addition to serving as a tool for connecting people with their friends. It will power bots, in addition to direct communications between service representatives and customers. Right now, LiveMessage works with SMS, and it will be expanded to work on Facebook Messenger later this year. With the launch of LiveMessage, Salesforce is joining a veritable pantheon of different tech companies competing to provide the underlying technology powering companies’ bots. While announcing the product on stage at the company’s Dreamforce event Wednesday, Benioff talked about how it would facilitate “conversations as a platform,” cribbing a phrase directly from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s discussions of his company’s bot-making tools.  In addition to Microsoft, Salesforce will also be competing with Facebook, Google, Oracle and a host of startups.  Salesforce has an advantage, as the home of customer data for its fleet of users. Easily connecting that information with logic that can operate a chatbot seems like an appealing option for businesses looking to create one without a ton of work.  In addition to running bots, LiveMessage can also be used to connect customer service representatives with users for a live chat session over a variety of platforms. That means it would be possible for users to message a business on Facebook, and get connected with a person who can help them. With LiveMessage, that person would be able to handle the conversation through Salesforce.  It’s all based on technology from HeyWire, a company that Salesforce acquired earlier this year.  What remains to be seen is whether the bot platforms actually take off with users. Tech industry insiders like execs at Microsoft and Salesforce clearly believe in bots. But it’s not clear that users really want to replace traditional user interfaces with automated conversation partners.

A supercomputer whirs away in London, crunching complex drug chemistries into deep learning algorithms to discover new medications. A few miles away, a DeepMind neural network scans millions of images from Moorfields Eye Hospital, searching for signs of eye disease. Suddenly, your smartphone rings — it’s a chatbot. The application casually asks if you still have that headache from yesterday and if you’d like to book a doctor’s appointment for tomorrow. Of all the fields that artificial intelligence will disrupt in the coming years, healthcare may see the greatest paradigm shift. AI’s influence in the industry will be deep and broad. Image-recognition algorithms already help detect diseases at an astonishing rate. Now, a few startups are using intelligent machines to redesign the clinic, redefine the role of the practitioner, and reposition the patient in relation to her own health. The shift should be welcome. At first glance, AI will bring unprecedented well-being to people around the world. But with progress comes caution about letting machines infiltrate an inherently human endeavor and gain access to our most intimate selves. The doctor-patient relationship hasn’t changed much since Hippocrates first penned his medical oath over two thousand years ago. Patients feel ill, go to the clinic, and point to where it hurts. Doctors check vitals, probe a bit, ask a couple questions, offer a diagnosis, and maybe write a prescription. There’s suffering on the side of the patient, sympathy from the practitioner, and a collective fight against disease. But physicians are busy and patients can be impatient. They often book consultations for illnesses that would’ve passed with a little extra rest, and they regularly fail to follow through with treatments once they leave the clinic. Online symptom checkers make digital societies rife with spurious self-diagnoses. Shortages of trained physicians and ties to traditional medicine make developing regions particularly prone to disease. “We can now answer a patient’s questions like a doctor can.” Your.MD and Babylon Health are two London-based digital health startups with the same ambitious goal — fix broken healthcare systems. They’re doing this by cutting down on unnecessary consultations, creating an advanced medical data model, and developing AI that they hope can engage patients just like a physician. Your.MD claims it has already built the largest ever medical map linking probabilities between symptoms and conditions. Its chatbot uses machine-learning algorithms and natural-language processing to understand and engage its users. The application comes pre-installed on all Galaxy phones thanks to ongoing partnerships with Samsung, and the startup insists it will always be available for free. It’s a sophisticated system, but still a work in progress, continuing to crowdsource medical information from physicians. At a deep-learning conference in London last week, Your.MD CEO Matteo Berlucchi demonstrated his product as he created a new account. The chatbot asked a series of casual questions about the user’s age, gender, and health complaints. From here the system seamlessly filled in a user profile, intended to save patients time spent filling in medical forms. Related: Tomorrow’s medications could be invented by a deep learning supercomputer Imagine Your.MD’s AI is networked like a doctor’s mind. A dense medical vocabulary library helps it pinpoint the patient’s symptoms. Depending on variables like age, gender, location, and time of year, the AI personalizes its questions for each case. The expansive medical map and patient profile help the AI determine the probability that these symptoms signal this or that condition. Once an informal diagnosis is made, the system pulls data from the National Health Service to offer suggestions and helps patients connect with physicians. “We can now answer a patient’s questions like a doctor can,” Berlucchi said. Back by machine learning, the system can learn like a doctor, assimilating and applying knowledge gained from one patient’s case to another’s. The team over at Babylon Health is busy developing what they call “the world’s most accurate medical artificial intelligence.” They plan to launch the feature as an addition to their freemium digital healthcare app in November. Babylon Health CEO Ali Parsa showed off the chatbot in London, answering queries regarding a headache he’d reported earlier. The bot followed up like a well-trained physician — or perhaps a physician’s assistant. It lead Parsa through questions and answers, and finally advised him that his headache may be irritating but shouldn’t cause concern. It offered to book a consultation if he still wished. “It just went through billions of variations of symptoms [to make that suggestion],” Parsa said. Not all doctors are optimistic about medical chatbots, however, and it isn’t just the disastrous display of Microsoft’s Tay that has them worried. “The AI just went through billions of variations of symptoms to make that suggestion.” In an interview with MIT Technology Review, practitioner and educator Dr. Clare Aichtison said, “While it’s true that computer recall is always going to be better than that of even the best doctor, what computers can’t do is communicate with people … People describe symptoms in very different ways depending on their personalities.” In other words, there’s something to be said for a doctor’s intuition and human relationship with her patient. “Either [the AI] will be too sensitive and result in increased attendance at the doctor’s, in which case there isn’t much point to it, or it won’t be sensitive enough and will result in missed serious diagnoses.” For these reasons, neither Your.MD nor Babylon intend to replace doctors with AI. Both partner with practicing physicians to make sure serious conditions get professional attention. Current regulations will keep the AI from making official diagnoses. The systems are instead designed to guide patients, suggest whether the severity of symptoms warrant a trip to the clinic, help practitioners make more informed diagnoses. The doctor-patient relationship may never disappear. No matter how far AI advances in the future, it’s hard to imagine that the interpersonal aspects of healthcare will ever be delegated to machines. There’s something dystopian in the thought. A more settling scenario will see algorithms assume less glamorous, more systematic tasks, leaving practitioners in roles rich with intuition and interaction. But Your.MD, Babylon Health, and even the American Psychiatric Association (APA) don’t think that vision is so farfetched nor so dystopian. Related: Google’s DeepMind will soon apply artificial intelligence to the detection of eye diseases In reviewing the symptoms and conditions most often reported by its users, Your.MD found people share some remarkably personal information with its AI. “The most common things we hear from users are about STIs and mental health,” Berlucchi said. “People disclose their personal health much more openly to a bot.” A number of studies support this claim. Babylon Health also sees mental health as a topic that AI may benefit. Parsa discussed the possibility of an AI that can check in on users if it notices suggestive behavior patterns, like spending an unusual amount of time on the phone and in the house. Although the feature won’t appear in the company’s next update, Parsa envisions that these subtle interventions could one say assist cases of depression and even help prevent suicides. Therapeutic chatbots go back over 50 years to ELIZA, a primitive program that was intended to parody the shallowness of conversations between humans and machines, but which users found to be surprisingly therapeutic. Today, much more sophisticated systems exist, such as the Chinese app Xiao Ice and NeuroLex. The Microsoft-built Xiao Ice engages millions of smartphone users every hour and uses deep learning algorithms to scour the Internet for human-written texts and match these with user inputs to deliver natural sounding — if not completely personalized — communication. Inspired by a recent study that predicted psychosis with 100 percent accuracy, the engineers behind NeuroLex built their system to screen for schizophrenia by analyzing patients’ speech patterns. NeuroLex’s creator, Jim Schowebel, was recognized by the APA for the success of his system. There’s something dystopian in the thought that the interpersonal aspects of healthcare will ever be delegated to machines. “The use of machines in place of humans brings up several practical, ethical, and legal issues,” University of Washington School of Medicine Professor David D. Luxton told Digital Trends. “There are also potential safety issues. For example, there needs to be a procedure to address situations when a person indicates intent to harm themselves or others while they are interacting with a chatbot. This raises the legal question of who would be liable in such a scenario?” Luxton has additional concern about bots’s ability to provide consistently high-quality information. “Will the information be based on current best-practices in a particular domain of care?” Luxton asked. “How these systems should be regulated is an important question that will need to be addressed in the years ahead.” Still, Luxton supports the use of chatbots in mental health for their constant accessibility, ability to address gaps in patient care, and potential economic value. “Chatbots … may help to save health care costs when used in place of a human, such as a preliminary step of helping to assess a condition and providing self-care recommendations,” he said. “These systems also have the potential to learn the patterns and preferences of individual care seekers, thus, they can adapt to the individual’s personal needs.” Whether AI will ever stand in for GPs, therapists, or specialists is yet to be determined. They’re certainly prolific in other industries. But these systems aren’t yet sophisticated enough and we, as a society, have to tackle the many questions that accompany new technologies in such an intimate field. For now though, trends see AI in the role of assistant. Only time will tell how well patients respond to the buzz of their smartphone and the sensation of always having an artificial doctor in their pocket.

During his opening Dreamforce keynote, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff introduced a bevy of products and updates, many that have since been explored in-detail. However, there was one which he quickly skimmed over called LiveMessage, an application that consolidates communication across multiple messaging apps. Today we know a little bit more about this new tool for businesses. Built off of the HeyWire technology that Salesforce acquired last month, the app will provide service representatives more opportunities to engage customers where they are, not where the company wants them to be. “We’re in the midst of the largest disruption in the space since the creation of the 1-800 number, as we witness mobile messaging emerge as the new and preferred platform for service and support communication,” wrote HeyWire CEO Meredith Flynn-Ripley in a blog post announcing her company’s purchase. Salesforce said that the product is currently in beta development and will become available later this winter when it supports Facebook Messenger. Eventually it will open up for WeChat and Line for international customers. The service features tools designed to enable supervisors to oversee how conversations are being routed to managers and also includes macros and recommended knowledge tools. Salesforce claims that customer companies will have a 360-degree view across any channel. And yes, LiveMessage is also powered by Salesforce Einstein. Essentially, LiveMessage is a bot platform that lets companies to free up human service representatives to work on more complex problems. Through the app, representatives will have access to Salesforce data while also having conversations with multiple customers simultaneously. It also provide representatives with a single app from which to consolidate all communications, be it through text messaging, Facebook Messaging, WhatsApp, Snapchat, or a bevy of the other services. In doing so, Salesforce hopes that it will generate an uptick in customer satisfaction and representative productivity. There’s currently no word on whether Salesforce will open up LiveMessage to developers so they can incorporate their own bots. But it’s important to note that the end users won’t have to download a new app — they’ll just use Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Line, or text to provide feedback to companies. The service representatives are the ones that have one app to use moving forward. The bot within LiveMessage is a text-based IVR service. “Your phone is filled with rich and powerful messages, we exchange photos and videos, they’re fast, we do it in the context of our lives. We love sending these messages,” said Mike Milburn, senior vice president and general manage of Salesforce’s Service Cloud. He said that we’re approaching “new heights of customer success” with 1.4 billion live agent requests being made daily on Salesforce’s platform. He spoke about how people are redefining what “service” means every day, moving the conversation away from phone to email, to social media, apps, and now to messaging, where 80 billion messages are sent daily. “Your customers want to use any channel, from the highest touch to the lowest touch,” Milburn explained. The announcement comes after Facebook, Microsoft, and even Oracle have launched tools that will help companies build chatbots that consumers can talk with on messaging apps. Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella in the past few months has frequently spoken about conversation as a platform and specifically about how bots that participate in conversations with people effectively function as new apps. Launching LiveMessage comes amid a busy year for Salesforce, which launched new tools such as Field Service Lightning, opening its SOS video SDK to two-way communication, and launching an omni-channel supervisor. Get more stories like this on Twitter & Facebook

Chatbots have become a big topic of discussion at startups, venture capital firms, and Fortune 500s alike. There’s a lot of talk (and hype) around whether bots will take over customer service or whether chatbots will replace apps. That’s not to mention artificial intelligence and voice assistants like Siri and Google Assistant.

There’s a lot of information to absorb when it comes to chabots. Should my business have a chatbot? Should I start a bot company? These are the kinds of questions I get a lot, so let’s talk about the basics of chatbots, why they can do, and why they matter.

If you’ve been wondering what chatbots are – and whether they are here to stay – read on:

A chatbot is a computer you can talk to via messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Kik, Line, WhatsApp, WeChat, iMessage, and SMS. Chatbots can automatically respond to messages you receive for you.

Modern-day chatbots provide much of the functionality that mobile apps provide while living in a messaging conversation. They are used for customer support, automatically answering questions, delivering content, and even games and entertainment. But they also have capabilities nobody has yet discovered or built.

Think of chatbots like early websites – they may be simple now, but they will be able to do almost anything you can dream up eventually.

Business Insider has been tracking the growth of the top four messaging apps (Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Line, WeChat) versus the growth of the top four social networks, and it isn’t even close:

Not only is messaging bigger than social networks, but messaging’s growth outpaces the social networking benchmark. This is one of the core reasons why chatbots have become a hot topic in the tech industry.

Before bots took over our phone systems, businesses would have to employ thousands of customer service representatives to answer the phones to deal with customer complaints. And while customer service centers are still a thing, they are undeniably smaller than they were decades ago.

Why did businesses switch to automated phone systems? Simple: it’s scalable and more efficient. One person can only talk to one person at a time (usually), but a bot can talk to thousands of people simultaneously.

Chatbots offer a similar value proposition to businesses, but a larger scale and with vastly more capabilities. They can communicate with thousands of people simultaneously, answering their questions or helping them with their problems. With messaging becoming the preferred form of communication for more and more consumers, it’s inevitable that they will want to deal with customer service via text, iMessage, Messenger, Kik, or whatever messaging platform they prefer.

China has been on the chatbot bandwagon for years, but for good reason. Unlike the U.S., the Chinese Internet is more regulated, which has made WeChat the Facebook of China, even though it’s primarily a messaging platform. Its chatbots act more like lightweight apps where you can book a dentist, subscribe to content, and build complex programs.

From Michael Yuan, author of Chatbots: Building Intelligent Bots, explains how bots are perceived in China:

In WeChat jargon, a bot chat account is called a “public account”. First off, the WeChat “public account” bot program is extremely successful. If you start a business in China today, you will create a WeChat public account bot well before you have a website.

Remarkably, there is a new crop of VC funded content companies that operate exclusively in WeChat – they do not even have web sites despite being valued tens of millions of US dollars. Consider that the Chinese Internet censors can delete any WeChat public account (and take all the millions of followers with it) for any vaguely defined “offensive content”, it is testimony to how indispensable WeChat’s bot ecosystem has become in business and in everyday life.

These bots, divided into “subscription accounts” (for content) and “service accounts” (for customer service), dominate not just WeChat, but much of the online activity in China.

Just as VR has come into its own in the last few years but has been around for decades, chatbots aren’t a new technology, either. In the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) days, dozens of “chatterbots” interacted with millions of people. These early chatbots could make simple responses based on user prompts – often to hilarious or weird results.

SmarterChild, which you see above, was especially popular on AIM and led to an era of conversational bots, most of them for novelty. Its hilarious responses to early Internet users trying to troll it made it a viral sensation for its time. However, without any real utility, chatterbots eventually fell by the wayside.

The concept of chatbots isn’t new  –  it’s their technical capabilities and utility that are.

While AOL chatterbots were limited to simulating conversations, today’s chatbots have far more capabilities, thanks to the access developers have to platforms like WeChat, Facebook Messenger, and Apple iMessage.

It’s true that some developers are trying to replicate what AOL chatterbots did in the 2000s, but the smartest companies are building bots that can showcase content, integrate with customer service, let you purchase merchandise or tickets, assist you with daily tasks, and much more.

The interfaces of modern chatbots have evolved from their chatterbot ancestors:

Modern chatbots are less chat and more app.

Many people in the chatbot space like to talk about their company’s natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU) or artificial intelligence (AI) technology. And while we’ve made great strides in all these areas as a society, we are still faraway from a truly smart assistant that can talk like a human and understand everything you say.

Want proof? Just look at Microsoft’s Tay bot, which quickly devolved into racist and sexist language after extensive trolling. Even Siri and Alexa, two of the most advanced voice assistants on the planet, are still limited in their scope and ability to understand natural language. Chatbots will eventually be able to imitate people, but we are still years away from the next level.

With that said, chatbots are still capable of a tremendous amount of things, from simple conversations to scheduling to parsing content. The future is on its way!

Want to further your bot education? Here are some suggestions for where to go next to learn more about chatbots:

Botlist: The most comprehensive directory of chatbots. Chatbots Magazine: A publication dedicated to chatbots. The Bots Group: A community for bot enthusiasts and developers. Chatbot News: An invite-only forum for bot industry professionals. The O’Reilly Bots Podcast: A podcast on conversational UI.

Can bots make learning a new language easier? Duolingo is about to find out.

The language learning startup updated its app Thursday with a new feature that uses chatbots to help its users practice conversations.

SEE ALSO: This 1 piece of crucial English speaking advice is sending the internet wild

The feature only works for Spanish, French and German for now but the company is planning on adding more languages soon. (Up next are Italian and Portuguese, as well as English, for Spanish and Portuguese speakers.) 

Start a conversation and the bot, which has a few different “personalities,” will guide you through a text conversation around a particular subject. If you get stuck, the app suggests responses. And when you make a mistake the app will correct you. The conversations start out simple but get steadily more complex as you go along. The bots themselves are surprisingly adept at handling different types of conversations, responding differently to different variations for any given chat.

Bots, of course, have become something of a hot topic in Silicon Valley in the last year, thanks in part to companies like Facebook and Microsoft throwing resources at them. But language learning represents an interesting, and practical, use of the technology — and one that would not be possible without a lot of AI. 

You see, the vast majority of the chatbots you see in messaging apps aren’t true AI — they aren’t able to learn as people use them. Instead, many follow a kind of script (think, ordering a pizza, for instance.) That’s because creating AI that can understand language is an exceedingly difficult task (and one that is becoming increasingly important to tech giants like Microsoft and Facebook and Google.) But because Duolingo’s bots are AI-driven, the company says they will get better at responding the more people use them.

Of course, a text conversation can only take you so far. As any language teacher will tell you, there’s  no real substitute for actually practicing spoken conversations. And while Duolingo’s bots aren’t able to understand voice yet, support for voice-enabled conversations is planned for the coming months.

Today’s chatbots, for the most part, aren’t all that useful, but what if you could use them to learn a new language? When it comes to learning languages, using what you’ve learned in the context of a conversation is extremely useful. If you are learning online, though, you often don’t have anybody to talk to. That’s why Duolingo today introduced chatbots to its app that allow you to have AI-powered conversations.

These Duolingo Bots currently work for users who want to learn French, Spanish and German. The company promises it’ll add other languages soon. Sadly, this feature also currently only works in the Duolingo iPhone app. Given that the bots’ intelligence resides in the cloud, you’ll have to be connected to the Internet to use this feature.

To make talking to the bots a bit more compelling, the company tried to give its different bots a bit of personality. There’s Chef Robert, Renée the Driver and Officer Ada, for example. They will react differently to your answers (and correct you as necessary), but for the most part, the idea here is to mimic a real conversation.

These bots also allow for a degree of flexibility in your answers that most language-learning software simply isn’t designed for. There are plenty of ways to greet somebody, for example, but most services will often only accept a single answer. When you’re totally stumped for words, though, Duolingo offers a “help my reply” button with a few suggested answers.

“One of the main reasons people learn languages is to have conversations,” writes Duolingo CEO and co-founder Luis von Ahn in today’s announcement. “Students master vocabulary and comprehension skills with  Duolingo, but coming up with things to say in real­-life situations remains daunting. Bots offer a  sophisticated and effective answer to that need.”

For now, you can only use text chat to talk to the bots. Over time, Duolingo plans to allow for spoken conversations as well, though.

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Two months after Facebook began trialing Secret Conversations, the company has unleashed the “opt-in” end-to-end encryption feature, making it available to all 1 billion of its global users, Wired reports.

With the update, Messenger joins the majority of other chat apps that have already stepped up the security of their users’ privacy. As chat apps continue to become central to communication, the ubiquitous rollout of the end-to-end encryption will help assuage fears that hackers or law enforcement can access user information.

Requiring users to “opt-in” to Secret Conversations could impede its use by consumers. In order to use Secret Conversations, users must manually select “Secret” each time they begin a new encrypted conversation with their friends. They can also decide whether to add an expiration timer on sent messages, ranging from five seconds to 24 hours. However, turning on the feature will limit the number of actions users can take when sending text messages, stickers, and photos. And the feature needs to be turned off in order to access animated GIFs, chatbots, and businesses.

The chat app launched Secret Conversations likely to appease two factions: 

End users want to protect the increasing amounts of personal data they’re inputting. Many chat apps are furthering the number of services available to users in-app, including transportation, online shopping, and peer-to-peer payments. This is generating higher demand for a secure platform that protects the data being exchanged between users. 

Governments and law enforcement authorities are concerned that encryption tech obstructs intelligence. Because encryption blocks third-party access to a message’s content, these parties argue that they will lose access to key evidence that could forestall an impending terrorist attack or obstruct legal investigations. However, by limiting the number of actions users can make, as well as making the feature opt-in is one way Facebook can ease pressure from these players.  

End-to-end encryption also inhibits AI technology, like integrated chatbots. AI software, like Messenger’s virtual assistant M, relies on the collection of user data to function, and its ability to collect and analyze user data can be inhibited by end-to-end encryption. Offering encryption as an “opt-in” feature is one way to strike a balance. Google’s Allo offers a similar feature in order to provide sufficient data for Google Assistant.

Messaging apps have evolved beyond simple text communication tools to include commerce, file sharing, artificial intelligence, and more. And that evolution is ongoing.

BI Intelligence, Business Insider’s premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on messaging apps that takes a close look at the size of the messaging app market, how these apps are changing, and the types of opportunities for monetization that have emerged from the growing audience that uses messaging services daily.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

Mobile messaging apps are massive. The largest services have hundreds of millions of monthly active users (MAU). Falling data prices, cheaper devices, and improved features are helping propel their growth.

Messaging apps are about more than messaging. The first stage of the chat app revolution was focused on growth. In the next phase, companies will focus on building out services and monetizing chat apps’ massive user base.

Popular Asian messaging apps like WeChat, KakaoTalk, and LINE have taken the lead in finding innovative ways to keep users engaged. They’ve also built successful strategies for monetizing their services.

Media companies, and marketers are still investing more time and resources into social networks like Facebook and Twitter than they are into messaging services. That will change as messaging companies build out their services and provide more avenues for connecting brands, publishers, and advertisers with users.

In full, this report:

Gives a high-level overview of the messaging market in the US by comparing total monthly active users for the top chat apps.

Examines the user behavior of chat app users, specifically what makes them so attractive to brands, publishers, and advertisers.

Identifies what distinguishes chat apps in the West from their counterparts in the East.

Discusses the potentially lucrative avenues companies are pursuing to monetize their services.

Offers key insights and implications for marketers as they consider interacting with users through these new platforms.

To get your copy of this invaluable guide, choose one of these options:

Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP

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The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of the future of messaging apps.