[aleyan]

Do people actually prefer talking to bots instead of interacting with apps? Bots don't need to be installed usually, so that makes them lower barrier, but neither do websites.

They are useful when you want to query them with tasks that have a lot of degrees of freedom. These tasks may be easier to describe in human language where the user highlights the important parts forgoing the need to have a complicated GUI with lots of buttons. In these cases though, users don't know what the bot is capable off. GUIs are more discoverable because they present possible options with bad GUIs hiding even more possibilities in the submenus. This is one advantage over GUIs I would like to see bots explore.

In my experience however bots are not good at doing the right thing when queried with a task that has a lot of degrees of freedom. I own an Amazon Echo and at times I feel like I am reciting incantations to get it to do things I want from it; this is especially true of Alexa's "skills". If I have to memorize specific commands for the Echo to respond, it becomes a glorified voice operated command line to me. A verbose, inaccurate command line without a man page.

[mcintyre1994]

Websites don't need to be installed, but websites that aren't Facebook aren't where Facebook want their users to go.

I'm wondering whether this is really an Apps 2.0 play but in disguise because apps burnt all their user goodwill a long time ago - and they have a permission request thing too. I don't know anybody who intentionally uses any Facebook apps (or if they even still exist) and I doubt the current top tier companies have building one anywhere on their priority list.

This brings that functionality back to Facebook, not some other website or app, without the baggage associated with the old Facebook app stuff.

[superuser2]

I think there is some cognitive load involved in context switching between many apps and websites, managing separate accounts and passwords with each, knowing their UI differences, etc.

Opening chats to 5 recipients and ordering stuff from them with free form text is a lot lower friction than installing 5 apps or navigating to 5 websites, meeting their password complexity requirements, reentering addresses and CC numbers, etc.

It's not good news for freedom or the open web, but it probably does lower friction for users to give you money.

[pelumi]

I totally agree with you, not all tasks are best suited for bots. As your point suggests, we need an insane level of Natural Language Understanding handle and correctly execute tasks with many deegres of freedom.