chat apps
AI-powered chatbots and the future of language learning
Chatbots are one of the next big things. Facebook’s experimental feature M, Slack’s Slackbot or bot-add ons for existing messengers like Whatsapp and Telegram such as Murdoch or WhatsBot show where we are heading: Into a world of conversational interfaces based on texting. Despite all fancy interaction tech available, texting has evolved as the world population’s most favourite way of interaction. Over the next years, more people will start to have text conversations with machines, so called bots. Conversations that thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning could feel pretty much like those with people from our “human” contact list. Even though sometimes still, what is presented to be a bot actually could be a human.
One area in which I hope that text-based conversational interfaces will flourish is language learning. The other day, I myself acted as a language learning bot, and the results were promising. Continue Reading
The rise of the permanent group chat
Smartphone messaging is huge. So huge that WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have both been downloaded more than 1 billion times – for Android alone.
As often, in hindsight, the rise of chat apps seems obvious and predictable. After all, people had direct conversations since the beginning of humanity. The popularity of letters, telephone calls and text messaging (SMS) showed that people happily use every solution and technology available in order to satisfy their personal communication needs.
In many ways, messaging apps simply allow people to optimize and improve their one-to-one communication. It is an evolutionary process, not a revolution. Existing needs are satisfied in new ways – unlike with traditional social networking, which invented a kind of barrier-free, low cost one-to-many communication unheard of before.
However, there is one usage pattern of messaging apps that did not exist in the past. Something which truly changes our communication habits and lets us have a type of conversation that just was not possible before: the permanent group chat. Continue Reading