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Trending now
May 2017
Social Media is abuzz with the talks of Facebook's
annual developer summit, F8 held on 18th
April, 2017 at McEnery Convention Center in
San Jose, California; the whole world was
watching it live. One key aspect of the
announcement made by David Marcus, VP of
Messaging Products, was about ChatBots.
Facebook Messenger platform has more than
1.2 billion users, transmitting over 2 billion
messages monthly, connecting people and
businesses, in the presence of 100,000 active bots.
Facebook Messenger is not the only
messaging app, setting its foot into the
futuristic realms of Chatbots. Messaging Apps
like WeChat in China, Kik in US, Slack,
Amazon's Alexa-enabled Echo, Operator,
Google's Allo, Snapchat's Discover
+SnapCash, Telegram, Apple's Siri, Magic, and
a few others have already started making
phenomenal progress in the field of 'Conversational
Commerce', as they call it. But where and why
did the scope of conversational commerce
through messaging apps arise? According to
Statista, in a study of 1000 US customers, 44%
said they'd prefer AI chatbots for customer
relationship management. A Forrester research
stated that upwards of 3 billion consumers in
the world are heavy users of messaging
platforms and prefer silent conversations over
verbal ones. So all it took was, to connect the
dots and thus the origin of conversational
commerce; where brands connect with
consumers on a single messaging platform.
As defined by Social technology expert, Chris Messina, conversational commerce is,
“… utilizing chat, messaging, or other natural language interfaces (i.e. voice) to interact with people, brands, or
services and bots that heretofore have had no real place in the bidirectional, asynchronous messaging context.
The net result is that you and I will be talking to brands and companies over Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp,
Telegram, Slac k, and elsewhere before year's end, and will find it normal. “ (Read full article here:
https://medium.com/chris-messina/2016-will-be-the-year-of-conversational-commerce-1586e85e3991)
The key trends driving this movement are:
Growing usage of
messaging platforms
Inflection points being reached
in AI and Natural Language
Processing (NLP)
Rise of sensors, wearables
and advances in data science
and analytics
Integration of seamless payment
technology into third party
applications via APIs
Increased sophistication of
notifications that are context-
aware to provide an intelligent
interface layer to consumers