Is chat the undisputed user interface (UI) for mobile devices? If it is, what does this mean for intelligent assistance? This week the Wall Street Journal published an article on the front page of the Business & Technology section entitled “The Future of Mobile Chatting: Commerce.” In the article, authors Deepa Seetharaman and Ann Juro Osawa, outline the evolution of Tencent Holdings Ltd’s popular WeChat from a person-to-person messaging app to a broad-scale e-commerce platform.

WeChat and other messaging apps are both easy to use and a natural gateway to activities that require information retrieval and transactional processing. As a result, messaging apps have become the dominant UI for mobile users in Asia. They are also becoming a major platform for mobile intelligent assistance.

Messaging apps haven’t quite taken over mobile usage in North America and Europe, but that seems to be the direction things are headed. Companies have some time to get prepared, but time may be short. U.S.-based companies are exploring ways to reach out to their customer base via chat apps. The WSJ article sites PayPal and Hyatt Hotels Group as two organizations experimenting with chat-based services. Hyatt guests can use Facebook Messenger to ask for clean towels or other housekeeping services.

Opus recently wrote about a partnership between Facebook and [24]7 that enables enterprise chat agents to join a Facebook Messenger-based conversation for digital commerce. The chat agents can be automated or human and the two-way conversation inside Messenger means the customer never has to leave his or her preferred interface to engage with the company.

Speaking of Facebook Messenger, Josh Constine of Techcrunch, reported yesterday that Facebook has quietly allowed some developers access to a “secret” Chat SDK. The Chat SDK lets developers build bots that can be integrated into Facebook Messenger. The bots can respond to text messages and perform services that might include providing product information and pricing, location services, and even “buy” buttons.

Intelligent assistance has transitioned from the IVR to web search to multimodal enterprise intelligent assistants. As mobile becomes the preferred way of joining the connected world, intelligent assistance will most likely need to make the transition to text-based messaging apps. But as Dan Miller, lead analyst with Opus Research, recently noted in his post on false choices, it doesn’t make sense to throw out existing technologies and replace them wholesale. Companies that have deployed web and mobile intelligent assistants are in a great position to add text-based chat when the time is right. In the meantime, web self-service via an intelligent assistant interface seems to be the right digital strategy in many parts of the world.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Facebook, intelligent Assistants, Chat, WeChat