Recently I have been to a meetup about chatbots. I was expecting something technical. But it seems that I was totally mislead on what chatbots are. They are visibly now more of a marketing tool than just a cool piece of technology.

I’m pretty convinced that web interfaces are going to die slowly in favor of more conversational interfaces. But in past technology shift we had some time between appearance and marketability. Like with the web, the social networks, etc. No more. Chatbots are immediate slaves for sales volumes. All the blooming of new services for ‘building your own bot’ are just totally geared towards customers management and acquisition.

My naive assumption was that assistive conversational interface could have a larger scope. But well, the market is driven by what sells, and what sells is what make more sales. I just hope it will have a nice border effect to improve chatbots as a tool or as a general interface to access information.

But my instinct warns me against the potential invasion of our social world online by all sort of aggressive automated peddlers. The same way we get robotic phone calls. Chatbots are going to be the new color of spam?