Please, Facebook, don't make me speak to your awful chatbots

The future of apps is chatbots, and it’s going to be terrible

Have you heard? Apps are dead: chatbots are the new apps. And they will soon be doing everything, from taking your pizza orders to scheduling your meetings. This is the future and it’s going to be terrible.

The rise of the chatbot has been foretold for some time but only in the past few weeks with Facebook’s Messenger bots, chat app Kik’s bot store and the rise of subversive artbots have they really hit the public consciousness.

So how did we get here? In many ways, it’s the perfect convergence of almost every tech trend of the past five years.

Trend one: the hybrid command line
Remember Peach? Probably not. At this stage, four months after launch, it seems unlikely that even Peach’s developers remember Peach. The app, a social network from the co-founder of Vine, tried to live somewhere between a Twitter-style social network and a WhatsApp-style messaging platform. It was fun for about three days, and then it died a quick death as everyone got bored. Continue reading...

Published By - Theguardian.com - Sports New, LifeStyle News, Politics news, UK and world political comment and analysis: Friday 29 April 2016 12.16 BST

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