AI chatbots were everywhere if one were going by all the hype in 2016. Everyone who is involved in technology wants to be in on the know for what to expect next year and how chatbots will change the world.
Ever curious, I peeked into my crystal ball and checked out the current trends for chatbot development and business implementation, noticed that there are no significant changes expected in Artificial Intelligence. However, we will observe new landmarks that will change some aspects of chatbot development and business implementation. Without further ado, let"s consider the major new trends for the upcoming year!
Raising automated chatbot testing
Chatbots" complexity is growing more and more each year. Full stop.
The real example being that bots are getting ever more intense. Now, it is not surprising to build a project which has about 100 intents and the complexity of conversation itself is 100s of decisions and condition points in the dialog.
You always should maintain a real case scenario to have to keep your bot updated. Also add new intents, new synonyms, branches in the conversation to save bot smart and usable. So the key question is: how do you ensure that everything is working in tip-top shape?.
We predict the rise of automated bots solutions. This you will enable you to automatically test a bot"s dialog and NLP.
The rise of bots for internal use for enterprises
Enterprise clients will be the major driver of growth of the chatbot development market. In many cases, the companies failed to onboard customers for their bots which are working out of these organizations. But the enterprises have a power for employees to use bots for internal purposes. That will be the key driver for market goals next year.
The main scenarios for enterprise bots would be the cases for sales personnel, HR interactions. But the question arose, "What is the main reason for using bots for automation business processes and instructions for enterprises?" The key driver is the cheaper cost of bots development comparing with mobile app development. That will cause the intensive growth of bots in the enterprises.
NLP and bot constructors will become the commodity
In ChatbotSummit, I recently saw dozen of solutions which actually do the same thing: NLP, NLU, building conversations in an easy way, integrating with any messaging platform and etc. Mentioned services become a commodity. Every provider seems to be able to provide the same and it becomes a just minimum required standard. There is no significant difference between DialogFlow, IBM Watson, Smooch, Rasa. So it seems many many startups do the same solutions.
The Ice Age of Facebook and WhatsApp will remain
We don"t expect significant changes to happen with Facebook and WhatsApp messengers. We would call it the Ice Age of FB and WA. In 2016 actually, Facebook raised such a huge amount of chatbots and now keeps silent.
My feeling, now it is very busy with solving own privacy security issues rather than development of the messenger platforms. It is major chatbot development companies keep focus for both — website bots, SMS bots, mobile apps.In the upcoming year, we willsee huge demand in such area comparing to initially expected Facebook messengers.
Data privacy: the doubts of reliability will dispel
Security or data privacy will become more and more relevant for big enterprises. There will be a big concern about letting large players like Google, Amazon or Microsoft own their conversational data.
It means in 2019, will appear more and more solutions to provide on-premise bot building solutions that guarantees data privacy for big companies that are concerned about it.
Most user download zero apps per month — that will drive to build more bots
The key methods for customer engagement are chatbots and mobile applications. Next year we will see that engagement via apps will fail. Actually, no one downloads the apps. No one wants to use up phone memory.
Instead of that, end-customers will engage with your system or buy goods/services via chatbot. Why? Besides the usual services that chatbot provides (push notifications, direct communication), it is a simple way to start/stop engagement without additional actions. It will be a motivation into the next year.
The User support platform includes engines for chatbot or holds the integration
Despite the personal data gathered from applications or bots, it has become the security. So the gathered data is used for improvement and learning AI assistance.
In 2019, people will more and more use an AI chatbot to communicate internal team, arrange own calendars, events, order food, plan vacations etc. It is obvious, the service becomes useful as they learn our habits, speech and in each case can offer a better and better solution.
