For discovery, FB Messenger actually has more channels for bot discovery than any other platform, including:
- m.me links with referral tracking
- Messenger Codes
- Several plugins that allow easy opt-in via developer's website, including the ability to by default opt-in users on any form/flow on your website into your bot experience on Messenger.
- Customer matching (use phone numbers to send updates to customers and acquire them as a bot user)
- Messenger destination ads
- Sharing features that many have used to achieve incredible viral reach.
The power that developers have to promote their own bots using these existing channels is largely undertapped. I would encourage developers to see what they're building as a business first, and a bot second. The bot is just a facet/channel into what you offer (even if it is a primary one). If you don't have a reason to offer a product or service or publish content, you probably don't have a reason to have a bot.
Admittedly, we could do better at setting user expectations for bots and in distinguishing them in search results and in the FB main app, and maybe pushing them in more places.
Re: inflated expectations. Totally right. The "AI Agent"/NLP use case is just one possibility for a bot, yet it's the sexiest one that the media seems to like. It's the tip of the iceberg -- there are a ton of more mundane but incredibly useful bots that are succeeding on the platform.
If any bot developer has questions about this, or wants to brainstorm ways to get users, I am happy to help or bounce ideas!
Here's what I mean:
- Processing orders through your site? Add the checkbox plugin. Users discover the bot when they go about their business on your site.
- Got a retail store, print ad, or want to post fliers around town? Messenger Codes. Users can discover your bot by seeing it in real life in those places.
- Reach a targeted audience on FB? Destination ads. Users discover via news feed.
- Got tons of users signing up for your app or site with SMS and want to expose a bot version to them, to take advantage of a better notification channel and social features? Customer matching.
- Publishing content? Put the "Send to messenger" plugin on your site. And use the share CTAs to let people spread the bot to their friends. The users discover your bot because their friend thinks what you're doing is awesome.
At this stage, "How do I get my bot discovered?" is akin to "How do I get my website discovered?".
The answer, as it is for every startup, is "Make something people want" (and put it in places people in that audience are likely to be!) If users have zero reason to come into contact with what you're doing otherwise, why would it being in the form of a bot make any difference?
That being said, we definitely want to familiarize more users with the concept and get them to try more bots! It's clear even those who are doing their darnedest to get their bot out there are running into this as an obstacle.
Yet still, the sum impact developers could have by solving a real problem in users' lives (i.e. not "I wish I had more bots to try out!"), and wielding these tools to make people with that problem come across your bot is going to be way more substantial than anything we can do on the platform level.
There plenty of real world problems whose solutions may be best expressed as bots rather than yet another app to download or website login to remember. And they come with awesome discovery opportunities built-in:
- Bot for dentists that sends appointment reminders and makes it a few taps for patients to book appointments (instead of calling and having to deal with the receptionist). Discovered via phone number matching. (Paging kalzumeus!)
- Bot for restaurants that makes it easy to order take-out and has special offers and loyalty points. Discovered via codes or me.me URLs printed on the receipt, and/or website.
- Bot for schools that make it easy for teachers to communicate with students/parents at scale, as well as collect money for field trips/supplies. Discovered via phone matching or URL sent out to students/parents, or by searching for the name of the school.
- Bot for night clubs that lets them send out their performance schedule and sell tickets all in the same place. Discovered via the nightclub's website + QR codes physically placed in the club. Or by searching for that nightclub. Or by your friends forwarding the fliers from the bot and asking "What are you doing Friday?". (Stuff forwarded from bots in Messenger automatically have a huge button linking the recipient to the bot to check it out!)
- Bot for newspapers to send out content to subscribers in a high engagement way. Discovered via website and via printed codes/URLs on the newspaper itself.
- Bot for public transit agencies to let riders look up schedule/fare info and get notifications for their routes and notification of anything that might affect their trip. Discovered via poster by the bus stop, on the bus, and on the agency's website.
- Bot for landlords to collect rent, sent invoices, and recieve maintenance requests without the user having to download some dumb app. (After moving back to SF, saw that mine has something called "Rent Cafe" I'm supposed to download. Puh-leese.). Discovered via the move-in packet and/or link in emails. I'd probably pay my rent on time if I had this.
I think you're getting the point. The total number of people who go to nightclubs, dentists, read newspapers, ride busses, and live in apartments, is many many times the number who go "Oh, I wonder what bots are out this week!"
These examples are not to say that "bots for bots sake" won't succeed and that you should only be solving boring small business problems. But these sort of problems felt by the long tail are things bots are particularly great at! They're real problems worth money, have natural built-in discovery opportunities that wouldn't work for apps/sites.
I hope this makes sense and gets people thinking!
Funny that you made the comparison of bots to websites, I wrote a post making the same comparison (in other aspects). Won't link here (don't want to self-promo), you can check my post history on HN if interested.
Anyway, I wanted to point out that while you're absolutely correct that there are tons of channels of Discovery outside of Messenger, I've found that by far the most effective method for accelerated growth of a bot was being featured on the "Bots" section on the Messenger app. In my experience launching several side projects bots, the only scenario where I've gained any meaningful amount of users at all is when I was listed there for a short time in a region.
This leads me to think that a lot of users browse around the Messenger app itself, looking for things to do, or bots to message.
Yes, in most of your use cases on this list, the bots tie to some outside service (physical or digital), and it wouldn't make sense to feature those bots on Messenger itself. But there are also bots that are primarily useful as a bot only, not tied to other services. (Icon8 is a great example, it's a very cool filter app that works by itself as a bot. Which is why it seems to be featured forever :) But that's exactly what I mean.)
In one of my previous write-ups I pointed out that, while unlikely for FB to implement, if there is some sort of newsfeed-like page on the Messenger mobile app where users can explore what other bots that their friends are using, it could expose bots to users a lot more quickly. Not saying exactly that would be a good design (it probably is a poorly designed feature if done that way), but something along those lines is what we would think is something that the platform itself could do to help.
Lots of side-projects don't get traction -- whether they're apps, sites, or bots.
Would love to see what you've tried and learned along the way.
https://m.me/memechicken (dev myself with design help)
https://m.me/mobmessenger (with friends)
https://m.me/playcoffeebreakgames (myself)
https://m.me/localcatchclub (with friends)
As far as learnings go, by far the most significant thing was on the UX side -- to not leave a user hanging. At the end of almost every response, include a quick reply button or a button (in a template) -- even if it just says "back to main menu" or something. As soon as the conversation hits a "dead end", the likelihood of a user dropping off skyrockets.
I'm sure there are hundreds of useful information-based services that don't depend on links to physical storefronts.
OTOH I can see why FB would intentionally not build that to avoid a flood of frivolous bots and provide more meaningful first experiences.
Can you confirm if the user directs into Messenger directly when they click the ad?
But I get what you mean -- the screen when you choose web browser or Messenger App is a really bad screen. It's a real turn-off for almost all users. Out of everyone we've surveyed (tens of them), nobody knew what that screen was about and what they were supposed to do on it.
What? The very first point is discovery (which is fair) which just smoothly melds into discovery ON FACEBOOK? So we just assume bot discovery is best handed off to FB/GOOG/ etc?
So now FB, in addition to being the de facto destination where your personal data goes to be exploited, is also supposed to "get their shit together" to enable even more of the data collection?
Have you noticed how nobody from FB has actually ever engaged with anyone on HN around the ethical issues surrounding any of their practices?
Your last point is about how everyone involved in bots seem to assume we already know how bots should work. You make the same assumption about who should lead this effort. I would rather the bot technology takes longer to pan out than see a world where the giant corporations are also the sole operators of the bot marketplaces.
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* Scalable architecture is, most of the time, a very-NOT-big-deal. Bots tend to be relatively lightweight apps, sending/receiving json data only. Even websocket Slack apps can now be replaced by HTTP API.
* Discovery is really un-solved at this time, especially by Facebook. Slack does a better job, but arguably has a smaller ecosystem of B2B bots to manage and promote.
However, I think the article is about a rather ambitious (more than usual) and interesting bot. Having to parse normal language symptoms into medical terms is 1) an interesting use case 2) hard to do well technically. So maybe they face challenges most bot dev don't face.
Design-wise, most people don't see how hard it is to design chatbot flows that hard not horrible and confusing. Most chatbots are horrible and confusing at the moment, because coding bots is easy, designing them is really hard.
I think the article make interesting points about their own specific case, but their situation is perhaps less general than they seem to think.
In this case I would think you'd want to display when the rules/facts used for recommendations were last updated, which would add extra fields to track. There are also some interesting QA problems to work through.
I'm curious how this architecture (or any "AI" medical tool) handles regulatory compliance issues.
Currently the typical answer from a medical device company is a combination of "carefully" and "with clinical oversight". The typical answer from a non-medical startup seems to be "poorly", for the most part.
https://www.quora.com/Medical-Devices-Is-IBM-Watson-FDA-regu...
"there are plenty of more informative bot articles that would better serve the HN audience" could you share those articles ?
I saw a recent article at oreilly ideas : https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/designing-bots
The article describes:
1 (scalable architecture) : but the common solutions to this problem are not unique to chatbots
2 (a conversational agent must converse) : actually, that's a design decision for each individual bot, there are alternative ways of thinking about it.
3 (users will get frustrated) : this is actually a not a tech/AI problem, but a UI (user expectation) problem, see below.
The actual top 3 problems chatbot makers face are (in order):
#1 Discovery (!!!) : people don't know where/how to find bots and Facebook does not have their shit together in this regard (almost a year after launching their bot platform, there are still crucial errors. Result: most bots that could make a difference in the real world never get any traction, or enough users to train or iterate.
#2 Onboarding / setting expectations : the majority of (non-test or -product hunt) users of your bot are having their first chatbot experience with yours. Guiding them in the correct way is your #1 design priority. Result: a dissapointed general public.
#3 Inflated expectations : Mainly a problem for those who try to sell chatbots in B2B. Its' almost the opposite problem to #2. Most people and media conflate AI with chatbots. But the recent advances in machine learning (which are the reason for the current attention the term "AI" has been getting) are not (yet) applicable to chatbots in general. Add to this expectations of a Jarvis, Siri, etc. but then "for x". Result: dissapointed clients and an even quicker deflation of the hype.
And this is not even going into monetization!
All in all, I'm just frustrated that everyone involved in bots seem to assume that we already know how bots should work. I work in bots and I have yet to see one really impact user's lives. I wish for more humility and experimentation. At least we're all sharing what we're learning, so there's that.