Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint recently posted on his blog about the four basic use cases for the current generation of chatbots. They are as follows:

• Alerts
• Search/Input
• Support
• Booking

Chatting with an Expedia Bot to Find and Book a Hotel
Earlier this month we wrote about Radisson’s Edward chatbot, a hospitality bot that’s a great example of the support use case. Now Expedia has launched what a Venture Beat article indicates is an admittedly experimental chatbot. Expedia views this initial bot as equivalent to “dipping a toe in the water. “

The Expedia chatbot is simple to engage and easy to interact with. You type a message to @Expedia within Facebook Messenger and the bot immediately responds with an offer to help you find a hotel.
The bot operates within a very restricted framework for now. That current framework consists of the following parameters:

• Location
• Check-in date
• Length of stay
• Number of people

Once the bot has this information, it offers what it calls the five most popular hotels in that location. You can choose to view each of the top five hotels individually or have a look all the hotels Expedia has found for your parameters. Either way, you need to leave the Messenger platform to view a hotel in the Expedia responsive website or app.

The chatbot is basically a conversational search filter to narrow down your hotel search. You can’t ask it specific questions about a hotel property. For example, you can’t ask which of the five recommended hotels is pet friendly or closest to a specific landmark. In my case, I asked it which of the hotel’s had its own boat dock, but that query fell outside the chatbot’s current parameters.

After a quick trial of the bot, it’s easy to see that creating a chatbot to fully replace an intensive self-directed web search is challenging. If I’m planning a trip, I’d most likely prefer to use a desktop web browser to search hotels, view locations, query specifics about the hotel, and find out anything else that I need to know before I commit my money.

Expedia will almost certainly expand the capabilities of this initial chatbot. We can only speculate about improvements to come in future upgrades. Adding an ability to respond to a broader range of questions about the hotel property might be on the list. A more advanced feature might be enabling an easy way for the bot to authenticate the user and then leverage preferences or past selections in the user’s Expedia account to anticipate requests and make more targeted recommendations.

For now, Expedia’s toe dip into the chatbot world with its Facebook Messenger-based booking assistant seems a good first step. As more potential customers take to messaging platforms to shop for goods and services and complete transactions, the Expedia bot will be there to greet and assist them.

Chatting With Jessie for a Fun Interactive Story Experience
Several weeks ago I tried out a completely different type of chatbot. This chatbot is so “way out there” that it doesn’t even fall into one of Tunguz’s four use case categories. To understand the purpose of Pullstring’s Humani Jessie chatbot, you’d have to create a fifth, hybrid category that could be called something like “entertainment marketing.”

As soon as you engage with Humani’s Jessie chatbot on Facebook Messenger, you’re plunged into a kind of sleazy interactive romance novel. Jessie is a messed-up millennial in search of a job, new living accommodations, and a her next hot date. She texts with you as if you’re her closest confidante and seeks your counsel on all sorts of crazy decisions.

Jessie disappears and then reappears with a text when you’re least expecting it, just like a real, flaky friend might. Though the Jessie / Humani isn’t marketing anything other than itself at this point, the overall conversational experience is engaging and could be a platform for brand marketing.

Creating an Engaging Chatbot Experience
Which experience is more satisfying–booking a hotel via the Expedia chatbot or chatting with Jessie? Humani’s Jessie has the upperhand in terms of sheer user engagement. I interacted with the Expedia app for five to ten minutes tops. I didn’t even count the time I spent interacting with Jessie, but the interactions occurred over several minutes for almost a week.

What does this tale of two bots says about the future of bot-driven commerce and customer support? Maybe not much. In a recent article, Scott Rosenberg investigated various use cases for bots and quoted the team from the messaging platform Kik as saying the present moment for bots is akin to the web’s “Netscape 1.0, blink-tag phase.” In other words, we’re really early on in the evolution of bots.

Bots and their makers will continue to search for the most successful models. But if user engagement is any measure of success, bots that offer truly entertaining conversational experiences may eventually rise to the top.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: intelligent Assistants, chatbots, Expedia, Redpoint