Bots Will Change the World—Just Not Yours

I attended the Facebook F8 conference on April 12–13. The purpose of the conference is to showcase new technologies and advances they’re working on, and to inspire and provide developers with the tools they’ll need to start building with them. As a UX designer with a deep interest in development, this was the ideal conference for me.

Bots

The big release at F8 this year were Facebook Messenger bots. Facebook now allows developers to create bots, which are basically applications that communicate with the user entirely on the Messenger platform. This means users can talk to applications, websites, businesses and services without installing a new app. Interactions are mostly textual, similar to text messages. Many articles have been written about how these bots will affect our daily lives, and this may be true, but I believe we’re only skimming the surface and aren’t thinking about the more significant things we can achieve with bots. I believe bots will radically change the lives of billions of people in developing countries.

Conversational UIs have been all the rage lately, and the focus has been on the American consumer market. Yes, we will be able to purchase flowers just by typing “I want flowers” to 1–800-FLOWERS, we’ll be able to track our online orders, and yes, we will be communicating with businesses through yet another channel. Our experiences may be better with bots, but they are improvements, add-ons or substitutes to what we already have. I don’t think they will become critical to our lives the way the internet and apps have been.

Bots will change the world

Roughly 4 billion people live in areas where 3G or faster internet is unavailable. For those people, downloading an app is often impossible or prohibitively expensive. With many popular app builds weighing in at over 30MB, downloading an app over a 2G connection would take about an hour— and that’s if the connection is robust and stable enough to even complete the download.

The 2G connections we are talking about are often expensive, and for populations that are usually less affluent, this is a big cost to bear. Would you download an app if you had to pay $20 just for the data to download it? Relative to income, that’s how much it would cost someone in the Congo to download an average app. As a work-around, people in developing countries install apps at local telecom stores after being selected from a paper catalog. Getting a new app often involves walking to the nearest village that has one of those shops.

This is where bots come in. It’s one app on your phone that instantly connects you to an unlimited amount of products, services and businesses. No install, no expensive data transfers, immediate and always up to date. That’s the promise for bots that I am excited about. Sure, getting your Amazon Fresh shipment notification or the latest gif through a bot is pretty cool — but when it comes to the rest of the world, bots will change the way they’re connected in a way that’s never been seen before.

I see three major technical factors that can make bots a game-changer.

Bots are lightweight

Bots mostly communicate using text. Text is extremely lightweight, requiring next to no data, meaning that even on 2G connections, bots will feel instant. And because text is so lightweight, using bots will be nearly free, even when data is expensive. 20,000 bot messages can be exchanged for the same amount of data you need to download an app.

Bots can speak any language

Text is easy to localize. This is especially important for countries with multiple languages such as India. This allows for the easy inclusion of a whole population. Simply translating text is easy, making a design work for a range of languages is not. Luckily, this difficult task is taken care of by the messaging app. Developers won’t have to handle the logic of right to left and left to right writing, or make sure that the text always fits within a button’s constraints.

Bots are cheap

The cheapest way to build a digital product will be to build a bot. There is little design involved, and no front-end required. On top of that, bots are platform and language independent. A full-fledged bot could be built in a matter of weeks, something that would be unthinkable for native apps. What this means is that it will be much more cost-effective for startups and businesses in developing countries to build a bot rather than an app, or even a website!

Bots need our help

As of right now, bots are in their infancy. The technology is brand new, the possibilities endless. At first, we will see a lot of new tools, products and businesses that want to capitalize on this new wave. This is fine, but it would be great if we can keep in mind the world’s population who bots can benefit most.

I am looking forward to seeing open-source tools being created that will facilitate and make the development of bots so easy that developers all over the world can quickly and easily create bots that will benefit their communities.

So, yes, bots might not change your world, but they will change the lives of billions of people living on our planet. I can’t wait to see that happen.