Some Thoughts on Bots and Enhanced IM

Ever call one of those support numbers where you are stuck in a seamingly endless string of voice prompts and button presses? A well planned interactive voice response system can be very efficient however I seem to be the one that manages to find every loop, error and deadend possible. Maybe I need to change my career and become a tester. The same goes for voice recognition...at least in my case. I love the idea of it but I'm often redirected to a number I didn't want because some computer has interpreted my response incorrectly. Often times I rely on voice response driven directories when I'm on the go. Usually this means calling from my mobile phone from a noisy airport or restaurant. Certainly this is not an ideal environment for testing a computer's vocabulary.

Many people today prefer to communicate via instant messaging. In the last 10 years my primary communication usage has shifted from phone to email to IM. IM is a fantastic tool to stay in touch with colleagues, friends, customers, etc but it still lacks some basic features that would really take it to the next level.

Wouldn't it be cool if we could add group and support-like IM buddies to our lists. Now launching an IM session with thatcompany.com would be as simple as clicking on a friend to chat. Most mobile phones have IM clients available making this a very convenient solution. In addition let's take it one step further...while with a voice system I'm not happy to talk to a computer...with an IM bot I often don't care or even know that the replies I'm getting are not from a real person. Further such a system is less error prone assuming a reasonable level of typing is used. Imagine if you could add a friend called Google Expert that operated almost exactly the same way a Google search does today. Simply launch a session with Google Expert and type your question. This reminds me a lot of AskJeeves...my first reasonable searching experience on the web. A bot would reply in plain english the answer to my query and provide links to reference if I wanted to learn more.

Today's web experience is quite cumbersome. First you need to open a browser...then redirect to a search engine of your choice. Now you need to enter some relevant terms and hope you get a decent hit. Often this involves sorting through 10s and sometimes 100s of results only to find plenty of ads and redirects within sites. Even with all the available desktop tools that allow searching without first opening the browser...the response always comes in the form of a typical websearch results page within a browser. In addition to improving my interactive web experience, an IM bot would allow me to stay in touch with companies I like. Imagine opening an IM session with Amazon Guy and simply typing "what is the latest top ten fiction list?" After receiving the response you simply say "send me a copy"

This very simple mechanism would provide a more human experience for searching, purchasing, inquiring and supporting of a variety of products and services. Of course you can always use a browser for more comprehensive online shopping and research but often this could be offloaded in a more digestable format by adding buddies to my choice of already running IM clients.

By the way all this is available today including toolkits to build custom bots however finding this stuff is extremely difficult. Here's a couple you can start with for MSN. Perhaps if consumers are aware of this technology and start asking we'll see a whole new generation of bots.