The manifesto of future changes through the prism of the market

Hello! Around the messengers there is an incredible stir. If earlier that bots became the main technological trend, they were slurred, but now the headlines of the largest technological media are full of it. But as before, many people relate to this trend with a certain degree of skepticism, and I dare to try to prove why bots and the conversational interface in particular will become a revolution.

Formation and conjuncture

As Ben Eidelson, former Google Hangouts product manager, said : “Messaging is a form factor, a whole paradigm, and most importantly, a set of user expectations applied across markets, scenarios, and approaches.”

The main advantage of instant messaging services is that any communication is asynchronous by default and synchronous if necessary. Messengers symbolize the history of relationships between people. Message processing takes place in the context of long-term dialogs, where the topics discussed change throughout the conversation. For comparison, the old SMS clients did not know how to combine messages from the same sender, and in e-mail dialogs are formed around a specific topic.

Over the past few years, the message format itself has evolved greatly. There is a transition from textual forms of communication to multimedia. Users are increasingly sending different photos, videos, voice messages, stickers, and more.

The basis of modern communication is the transfer of emotions, not data. This statement is evidenced by the enormous popularity of emoticons and stickers. They took on the function of “body language”, expressing complex emotions in one picture. Emoticons and stickers in a sense are a universal language of communication. Regardless of their nationality, everyone with their help can share their thoughts and feelings.


Source - Business Insider

The combination of all these properties and expectations allowed messengers to become the main medium for communication. Instant messaging shows the highest level of user engagement compared to all other applications in other categories. They used to lshaya popularity over social networks, due to two factors:

• Social networks imply an element of self-identification, preserving a personal electronic heritage. Information in instant messengers dissolves in time, which does not require concentration on self-expression. It has value today and only today .
• Increasingly, users prefer to share information only in a narrow circle of friends and relatives. As already mentioned above, the main message inherent in the message carries an emotional component .

Hegemony in numbers

Source - QZ

Whatsapp The
world leader among instant messengers. In early February, WhatsApp reached 1 billion active users . Thousands of developers expect the opening of a full-fledged API, which is scheduled for mid-2016.

Facebook Messenger



900 million monthly users . At a recent F8 conference from Facebook, the social network announced the Messenger Platform . Experts call this eventmost important in the technology industry since the App Store. There were only 6 million users in the apple ecosystem at that time, but that did not stop her from becoming the harbinger of a new era of mobile. And the current Messenger user base exceeds the total number of iPhones ever sold.

WeChat
leader in China with MAU in 650 million . The messenger is a whole platform with video calls, a news feed, an electronic wallet, the “Favorites” function, similar to Evernote, games, a service similar to Shazaam that allows you to search for music and even an email client. WeChat has registered over 10 million official company accounts, most of which have already learned how to turn human labor and bots into synergy.

Skype


300 million monthly users . On March 30, 2016, at the annual Build conference from Microsoft, the Skype Bot platform was announced , which will allow creating text and video bots for the messenger. Microsoft Bot Framework was also introduced for developing bots for Slack, Office 365, Skype, etc.

Line .
Another Asian product that has conquered Japan, Thailand and Taiwan has 210 million monthly users. Line is also an entire platform for creating games and a marketplace for selling stickers, which generated only $ 75 million in its first year of existence . Line users send and receive over 2 billion stickers daily.

Telegram
Base of active users over 100 million per month . Another 350 thousand new users replenish the service daily, and servers deliver about 15 billion messages - in December 2014 this figure reached 1 billion. Telegram managed to break out to 1st place in the App Store in more than 45 countries. This week the Bot Platform 2.0 update was released . According to Forbes Telegram estimates about 100 thousand bots. One of the most popular among them is TinaBot with nearly 3 million users.

Slack


Source - Business Insider

I can not help but mention in this list Slack, which changes the principles of corporate communication. It is called the operating system . Slack 2.3 millionusers and each of them on average spends 10 hours a day logged in to it. 700,000 paid accounts, 60,000 teams. The launch of the Slack App Directory was accompanied by the opening of a fund of $ 80 million, whose funds are intended to stimulate the development of integrations and bots for this platform.

Snapchat
Probably one of the most original messengers. Thanks to self-destructing messages and a focus on graphic content, Snapchat has conquered U.S. teenagers. Its daily audience exceeds 100 million , which sends more than 700 million “snaps” and views more than 8 billion videos per day.

And others
Also, do not forget about the pioneer of iMessage mobile messengers with hundreds of millions of users, Canadian Kik incorporating all the best from WeChat, numerous QQ, Viber, KakaoTalk, Blackerry Messenger, Hangouts, ICQ and even Instagram with its Direct Messages. There are also SMS, instant messaging applications from social networks and a separate market segment - platforms like Voximplant , Smooch , Layer and Twilio IP Messaging , which allow you to embed instant messenger into the application.

Change of era

The golden age of mobile applications, whose bill goes to millions, is already over. Most smartphone users download 0 new applications per day, because they already have the necessary set, most often consisting of several instant messengers and clients for social networks.



According to SimilarWeb , in the first three days after installation, the average application loses 77% of daily active users, and after three months the user retention rate drops to 9%. A similar figure is confirmed by a study from Statista, but a sample of purely messengers shows a completely different indicator of user retention:


Source - Statista

With a high level of engagement and a huge audience of more than 3 billion people with minimal calculations, instant messengers have become a full-fledged platform. And on this platform, a new stage of technological evolution is being revived - bots.

Bots are becoming competitors for other mobile applications. They help to find out news, exchange rates, books, music, book a hotel, order a product, translate a word and even find a pair. Does the current situation not remind you of 2008? And 1995? Only today, chat is a browser, and a bot site and the benefits of this phenomenon are obvious to both business and users.

Each company encourages the client to install a separate application, but it is likely that the user will use it once. Despite this, he needs to perform a number of actions: go to the application store, find him, enter the password, wait for the download, create an account. Bots have a different level of interactivity and open up the possibility of instant interaction with the outside world.

Bots are a priori a cross-platform product, the design of which is to select the right words. In this regard, their development is much cheaper and easier in relation to mobile applications, which, in addition to being present on iOS, Android and Windows Phone, require strict compliance with style guides for each platform.

Any revolutionary technology is distinguished by the fact that it expands the horizons and opens up new opportunities for humans. The advent of personal computers marked the advent of a century of information, the Internet has become the quintessence of all knowledge of mankind, smartphones have opened access to this knowledge from anywhere in the world. What can bots give us? They allow you to receive any necessary information instantly. “It seems that all this is too simple to be called a revolution. This is the beauty of bots ”( Ted Livingston ). Bots are the beginning of a new Internet.

Many thanks to all for your attention.

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