Tim Peterson says, “A year ago, chatbots reemerged atop a mountain of hype that messaging marked tech’s latest paradigm shift, after messaging apps Facebook’s Messenger and Kik officially opened up to chatbots. A year later, the trend has slid down the mountain into its own uncanny valley. However, that slide may provide the momentum that chatbot makers, from brands to media companies to startups, need to make it back up the next mountain and stay there.

Chatbots have been on a downward slide for several reasons that seem to have snowballed together, according to executives at brands, agencies and technology companies. Messaging apps like Facebook’s Messenger have not done enough to promote chatbots, so not enough people have been using chatbots, so chatbot makers don’t have enough feedback to improve their conversational capabilities.

Roughly 78 percent of adults in the US have not even heard of chatbots, according to an online survey that Publicis Groupe’s Digitas LBi hired Harris Poll to conduct in November 2016. As much as that lack of awareness would appear to be a curse, it may actually be more of a blessing.

“The waters haven’t been muddied when that many people don’t know what chatbots are or have an expectation of what they should be,” said DigitasLBi’s senior VP of social strategy Jill Sherman”.

Inside chatbots’ year of growing pains: ‘We’re at an inflection point

Marketing Land

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