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Why The Chatbot Interface Might Just Be The Smart Home Story of 2017

by Michael Wolf
March 15, 2017March 22, 2017Filed under:
  • Interfaces
  • Robotics, AI & Data
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Voice interfaces are so 2016.

Not that Alexa and Google’s voice assistant won’t grow a bunch more in 2017, they will. But the reality is the smart home continues to evolve at a rapid clip, and one of the early trends I’ve noticed for 2017 is the emergence of the social messaging chatbot as a natural language interface for the smart home.

Credit Mark Zuckerberg for kicking off the trend in a big way at the end of 2016 when he debuted Jarvis, a personal growth project that the Facebook founder worked on for much of 2016. But Jarvis was more than just a skunkworks project, as the chatbot platform built into Messenger is gaining steam, including as an AI assistant for the smart home.

I recently used Facebook Messenger’s chatbot myself when I cooked steak with my Joule, and I was struck by how intuitive chat was as a command and interaction interface. While Joule is the first connected home device I know of to use the Messenger chatbot, I can certainly envision more devices that would work well with Messenger as the primary interface.

And if you’re more of a text message person than a Facebook Messenger user, don’t worry: text chatbots are coming your way as well.  As Lauren wrote this morning, a startup by the name of Unified Inbox is working with the likes of Bosch and Samsung to text-messaging based chatbots into the smart home as a way to work with their products. And while Yahoo’s text-messaging chatbot platform Captain is mainly focused on organizing communication with other family members, it’s not a stretch to imagine it as a control interface for our smart home.

While this trend is picking up speed, we should note that it’s not entirely new. Back in 2015, I wrote about how one of the biggest social messaging platforms in WeChat had started to integrate with smart home platform company Arrayent to utilize the messaging platform as an interface for products using Arrayent’s IoT platform.

While Alexa and other voice interfaces will no doubt continue their eye-popping growth this year, the reality is they are only one form of conversational interface for connected products. That’s why you can expect 2017 to be the year people starting talking about – and to – chatbots as a way to start controlling their things.


Related

Conversational Cooking: Exploring Chatbots As a Cooking Interface (Podcast)

People give me a strange look when I tell them I cook with Facebook, but using a chatbot as a cooking interface is surprisingly natural.

ChefSteps Launches Facebook Messenger Cooking Bot For Joule In Expanded AI Initiative

You ever wonder what the emoji is for "steak, medium rare?" Me neither. But if ChefStefs has their way, we may know soon. That's because the company has just launched the ability to cook with its Joule sous vide machine using Facebook Messenger. The new capability is part of a…

MasterCard Sees Bot Applications As A Way To “Go Where Consumers Are”

We know the potential for the chatbot interface to be one of the defining stories of connected living in 2017 is there. Mike has covered the variety of ways that "social messaging chatbots" will impact the smart home and of course, the smart kitchen. MasterCard isn't new to the smart…

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Tagged:
  • AI
  • Alexa
  • Arrayent
  • Bosch
  • Bot
  • ChatBot
  • Joule
  • Messenger
  • Samsung
  • WeChat

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