Bots are engaging.

Land on a webpage and you need to go through the effort of reading the content and figuring out exactly what is being told. Land on a bot and it will (ideally) tell you exactly what you need to know when you want to know it.

For this reason, it does not take much research to find several articles explaining why marketers should pay attention to bots.

So it comes as a great surprise to me that I have found no political bots.

Political Campaign or a Marketing Campaign

The best way I have heard political campaigns described to me are a combination of a war and an ad campaign. They are like battles in that you two opposing sides battle for victory. But at the same time political campaigns are essentially marketing campaigns. Opposing companies try to engage with as many supporters as possible in the hopes that they get more people to back their product i.e. their candidate.

Living in India, you learn that politicians will do anything to make you think of them. While at the local level, it is largely limited to offline methods like hoardings and pamphlets, national campaigns go all out. Radio, TV, public speeches, front page newspaper ads, youtube commercials, giant hoardings, the much dreaded WhatsApp forwards that your uncles do not stop sending, SMS the list is endless.

In fact in what I only assume to be a first of its kind, here is a picture of our current Prime Minister campaigning via hologram in his successful 2014 parliamentary election.

Really, makes you question the common adage, you can’t be in two places at once.

Of late in India, it has become something of a trend to engage supporters through shows where leaders address their supporters’ questions and concerns. The Prime Minister runs a radio show called Mann ki Baat (Talk from the Heart). His political rival and the chief minister of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal, recently started a internet show called Talk to AK which garnered hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and Facebook and had not one but two hashtags (#talktoaktomorrow and #TalkToAK trend on twitter for a few days).

I can’t help but think that a natural progression of this trend would be having a chatbot.

A Chatbot! Really?

They are a new tool in the kit of a marketer and a new weapon in the hands of a general waging a campaign.

As politicians try to engage with potential voters and supporters more meaningfully, a chatbot offers the promise of the ultimate level of engagement. Rather than having a talk show on which only a few supporters could get their questions through, imagine a future in which everyone has complete access to their leaders through a bot. A virtual AK or Modi if you will who will answer all your questions about their platforms.

Of course the benefits do not flow only in one direction. A corollary is that every citizen has complete access to their leaders through a bot and hold them more accountable. Imagine if you could scream at your local politician every time you saw a pothole or a garbage dump appear near your house. Political accountability would increase significantly.

Chatbots will disrupt governance and elections as we know them today.

They are a natural progression in our everlasting quest to create a system of government in which politicians are responsive to their voters desires and are held accountable for their actions after the frenzy of an election is over.

Inspired by this thought process I decided to create a political bot. Over the weekend I created a scripted bot that turned Arvind Kejriwal’s platform into a bot.

English version of Chat to AK Bot : chattoak.com
Hindi version of Chat to AK Bot : chattoak.com/hindi

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For those who have been aloof to the whole hype around this, I’ll give a quick sense on what’s been happening.

There are a few ways how people are looking at bots:

1. Chat-based assistants: You need to download an app (or could be an invisible app) where you can chat about a specific purpose or it can be a generic bot. This can be a completely automated bot like Luka (to find restaurants around you) or Digit (to manage your personal finance). Or it can be a hybrid of human operators and machine intelligence like Magic, Operator etc.
2. Bot platforms: Slack, Line, Kik, Telegram and now Facebook have opened up their chatbot platforms.
3. In a way, most of the messaging platforms are fighting amongst each other to be the bot platform of the future. This is primarily because most users prefer text to communicate and they are spending a lot of time on these messaging apps already. And nobody wants to miss out on this opportunity.
4. Bots-as-a-Service: As Sarah mentions in this post, if bots are the next big thing, then whatever makes bot-building easy and cross-platform will be huge. With all the messaging platforms opening up their interface, it’s still not simple for someone like me, who can’t code, to build a bot and deploy it right away.
5. There is a huge opportunity here to bridge this gap and allow anyone to have business logic running over an automated chat interface. Again, it will be a mix of rule based approach(think of having multiple if-else statements) and then NLP piece would come in.

What are we still missing?

Yes, there is a browser too!

Among all this noise, what we seem to forget is one of the widely used app on our mobile device: our very own mobile browser. And the fact that it is possible to chat within a browser as well.

All the 2 billion smartphones have one browser or the other.

Imagine this — you are looking to order medicines and you land up on this CareOnGo convBot through a Google search.

Or you might want to book a beauty service and MyGlamm bot chats with you and takes your order. Or you can interact with a potential employer over a bot, like how Pipemonk is doing it.
The difference being that you are landing up on convBots instead of the traditional websites.

There are a couple of interesting points which make a strong case for mobile browser being the bot platform :

• No change in user behavior: If you are new in town and need a haircut, you won’t go on Messenger or Telegram, you’d just do a Google search. Switching to a messaging app altogether for this can be a huge shift in user behavior.
• Huge Reach: According to a Morgan Stanley report, US mobile browser audiences are 2X larger than app audiences across the top 50 mobile web properties and have grown 1.2X faster over the past 3 years.

Mobile web experience is frustrating. Why don’t we try and fix it then instead of just abandoning such a huge platform altogether and leaving it to God’s mercy.

convBots on mobile web is the first step in this direction!

Views are of the author and Techseen may not necessarily subscribe to them

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