The talk of the town around Facebook’s developer conference recently: bots.
Among other things, the social network is expected to unveil tools for businesses to use chat bots to communicate with their customers on Messenger.
Bots have been on the rise — they automate tasks such as making appointments, broadcasting information and, most recently, chatting within messaging apps. But gargantuan Facebook could make them big.
“A bots store could be potentially as big as when the iTunes Store was launched,” Gareth Kay, co-founder of Chapter, a business consultancy in San Francisco, told Bloomberg.
But there’s room for mischief and abuse. Microsoft recently pulled its chat bot Tay, which became a high-profile artificial-intelligence experiment gone awry when its chats turned racist and sexist.
And who hasn’t felt the frustration of navigating an automated phone tree that gets you nowhere and leaves you desperate to talk to a real, live human being?
“Just because you can deploy these bots, automate engagement, doesn’t mean it’s appropriate,” Jenny Sussin, an analyst at Gartner, told Bloomberg. The bots that businesses will be able to deploy using the tools Facebook is expected to unveil could get spammy, too.
“My theory is that it’s going to become so abused that it’s going to become useless,” Sussin said.
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