May 2017
Intermediate to advanced
348 pages
7h 53m
English
Content preview from Designing BotsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 20. To Infinity and Beyond—The Future of Bots
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
—NIELS BOHR
WE LIVE IN A super-dynamic software industry. Each technology revolution happens faster than the previous one, and each one brings new ideas, experiences, and opportunities to us all. In this chapter we will cover a few of the likely future trends in the bot industry and explore some of the upcoming opportunities and challenges.
Future Trends in Bot Platforms
Bot platforms such as Slack, Facebook Messenger, Kik, and others are constantly evolving. Similar to Android and iOS, each platform is taking a slightly different approach and thus providing a different feature set. They are all following the same general trends, however, which impact design in one way or another.
More Interactivity
The chat platforms realize that plain text limits bots to very specific use cases and limits users’ ability to enter information in an easy and intuitive way. In a conversation I had with a lead engineer at Facebook, he stated it this way:
The user can say the color of paint they would like to buy, but picking it from a color picker would probably be much easier.
There are two approaches to interactivity that we are going to see expanding in the near future:
- Inline controls
A growing set of controls, such as drop-downs, checkboxes, date pickers, and so on, are going to be presented inline in the conversation, just like the buttons, carousels, and Quick Replies we have seen in this book. ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.