This was supposed to be the year that texting wasn't just texting anymore. After big announcements from Facebook, Google, and others, Americans were going to use messaging apps for so much more than chatting with friends. You were going to seamlessly interact with a world of online businesses. You were going to send questions to search engines and book tables at restaurants. You were going to get stuff done without ever opening another app.
Well, are you? For at least the past year a half, Silicon Valley has promised that messaging would transform the use of mobile devices, ushering in a post-app world. Google's Nick Fox says the shift will be as big a deal as the move from those clunky late `90s websites to interactive internet apps like Gmail and Google Maps---or even the move from desktop PCs to smartphones. But as 2016 comes to a close, messaging's grand promise has yet to become much of a reality.
Not that the biggest internet players aren't trying. This year, Google released Allo, a brand new messaging app tied into the Google search engine. Both Facebook and Microsoft rolled out new tools to allow the world's businesses to build apps atop existing messaging services such as Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Skype, and Telegram. Already, Facebook says, more than 33,000 of these business "bots" are available on Messenger, letting you do everything from booking plane flights to tracking your bank account. But just because you can doesn't mean you want to.
Yes, some signs are positive for messaging evangelists. According to one study spanning nine countries, 76 percent of consumers say they've communicated with businesses via standard cell phone texts, and 65 percent say they've done so via messaging apps such as Messenger and Skype. Stan Chudnovsky, the Facebook vice president who oversees Messenger, says that people are trading about one billion messages with businesses each month on Messenger---and that a small group of consumers do this kind of thing "all the time." This indicates, he says, that the same behavior will spread to a much wider portion of the population. But today, messaging is hardly a standard means of interacting with businesses---and it's a long way from the kind of tectonic shift 2016 was supposed to herald.
Not that this expanded vision of messaging came out of nowhere. In China, consumers turn to the popular messaging app WeChat for more than just chat. They use WeChat to read news, watch videos, hail taxis, order food, and buy movie tickets.
But the digital environment that spawned WeChat is quite different from the one here in the States, where people already do all this stuff through dedicated smartphones apps. "There is no Google Play Store in China. You have a bunch of competing app stores," says Lukens Orthwein, who oversaw WeChat's growth for Tencent, the Chinese internet giant behind the messaging service. "So WeChat could become a more trusted brand that any app store."
At the same time, he says, Silicon Valley has misunderstood WeChat as a truly catchall service. "You can book airline tickets. You can hail cabs. But those were never the killer apps. It was really all content-related stuff," he says. WeChat, in other words, was more about consuming information than completing tasks.
But Orthwein too still believes that other messaging apps can match the role of WeChat in China and perhaps even exceed it, just because these apps are already where we speed so much of our time and provide so many hooks into the rest of our lives. Like so many others, he is now chasing this ideal with his own startup.
The service best positioned to realize this ideal is WhatsApp. Facebook bought the messaging app in early 2014, and it's now used by more than a billion people worldwide. In many parts of the globe, it's a primary means of communication. The same can't be said for Google's Allo, which only just launched, or Facebook Messenger, which still lags behind the main Facebook app. Yet nearly 11 months after first announcing that it would move into commercial messaging, WhatsApp---which operates largely apart from Facebook---has yet to release tools that will allow businesses to build atop the service.
Faceboook and Microsoft, meanwhile, have released such tools in an effort to promote the idea of "chatbots," bits of code that let you interact with businesses in plain English. But as these companies freely admit, the chatbot idea is a long way from truly delivering on its promise. Online services still can't reliably understand and respond to natural language (either here or in China). Still, the leading AI labs are pushing hard to make that happen by applying the same so-called deep learning techniques that have proven so effective with image and speech recognition.
Google's Allo leans heavily on the latest in artificial intelligence, an area where Google excels. But as my colleague David Pierce says, it's also kind of an idiot sometimes. With help from deep learning, Allo can automatically suggest responses to incoming texts and photos, and very often, these suggestions are spot on. But Google's search engine often can't understand what you're even asking for, much less respond intelligibly to your requests. The AI just can't understand you yet.
As a result, the best chatbots already in operation today try to keep things simple. They focus on one task rather than many. GoButler zeros in on plane reservations. MyKai only does online banking. At this point, specialization is the right way to go. The bot only has to learn so much.
Still, that narrow set of abilities means that these bots aren't that useful. They're intriguing, but also annoying. You might try them for fun, but you probably won't stick with them. So far, that sums up what the biggest, smartest tech companies in the world have accomplished in the push to make messaging the Next Big Thing. You can see how, one day, it might be great. But that day is still in the distance.
