[ryporter]

Why is a chatbot the best medium for your service? When I'm doing product comparison, I like to browse through products with pictures and to see tables comparing different products along different dimensions. I understand that you are trying to prevent information overload, but a curated website can provide this. Reducing it down to a chatbot strikes me as information underload.

[krumhausen]

Conversational commerce is still in its very early days so we're not sure whether it would work or not. Conversational commerce does, however, have certain benefits over the traditional web experience. Because of the ongoing interaction with the user, the service will be able to offer extreme personalisation, and shorten the purchase flow radically.

Today on the web, we have created a destination mentality, where brands convince consumers to go to their site and stay there. Conversational or social commerce is more like the real world were you walk past something, you do something else and then perhaps you chat about it and even purchase it later. The real world is more chaotic and conversational commerce havs the potential to reflect that better than the traditional web.

That being said, we do not believe the future of conversational commerce is a simple chatbot reflecting the old-school terminal. As you mentioned, pure text is not great for discoverability and comparisons. We believe the future of conversational commerce belongs to the hybrid interface, bringing that GUI and command line paradigms together.

One final note is that as AI gets more and more sophisticated, the need for browsing through the endless products on Pinterest might disappear, as the service will be able to offer recommendations that fit exactly to the users’ needs. The service could present three products based on user needs, allowing the user to make a more informed decision.

More reading: - http://www.psfk.com/2016/04/layer-messaging-app-developers-u... - https://medium.com/chris-messina/2016-will-be-the-year-of-co...

[jurajpal]

Thanks for your feedback! We chose chatbot as the medium only after carefully talking to our target audience and testing some prototypes with them last summer. They loved it because Sure gave them 2-3 curated recommendations, rather than an endless list of Google search results. At the same time, you can always ask for more options and start comparing them.

We believe that even navigating between product comparison tables can be simplified with a simple conversation. Sure aims to be so personal that you can ask the bot to compare different options for you along the dimensions that matter to you.

And when it comes to product and even restaurant recommendations, I completely agree with you that images matter and we're really excited about what the new chatbot UI on Facebook Messenger allows us to do and this is just the beginning.