#H2HChat How Chatbots & Artificial Intelligence is Evolving Social Experience w/ Dion Hinchcliffe

Hey, how are you doing? This is another HTH Chat. We are so excited to have you here with us. That means that it's another Monday at noon Pacific Standard Time, and I have a great guest on today, very good friend of mine, Dion Hinchcliffe. He is an internationally recognized digital expert, bestselling book author, frequent keynote speaker, analyst, futurist, and strategy expert. Based in the Washington, D.C. area, which is where I'm at with my wife. He is currently Chief Strategy Officer at Industry Strategy and Online Community Solutions for Seven Summits. Have to hear a little bit about how— what that's all about from him. Dion is also a widely read ZDNet columnist and judges the prestigious CIO 100 Awards for CIO Magazine every year. So he's been around the block, that is for sure. He's recently Robert Half Inc. identified him as one of the top 20 globally that technology leaders mention most. So very glad to have you here. We're going live. You are in the city of— tell me again, Chicago?

Yeah, just outside of Chicago, Bryan. I'm in Schaumburg, Illinois.

Nice. Well, thanks for letting us catch up with you while you're on the road. I really appreciate it. I know it's always fun to have these conversations in various And, and, uh, and, and airports and, and so on. But, um, you know, just really, really excited to have you here and, uh, looking forward to having a talk. Uh, so hopefully your travels are going well, you're doing well.

Yeah, everything's going great. Uh, having a, a good trip. Uh, and, um, yeah, looking forward to the chat today, Bryan. Thanks for having me.

Good. Speaking of chat, we are going to be talking today about chat bots and artificial intelligence and how they are evolving in the digital and social experience. It's, it's a hot topic. I mean, this is one of the coolest things, and yet it kind of scares me a little bit because it starts to become, you know, like a little bit more around that, that movie Her. Did you see that movie?

I absolutely did. And it's very much like that. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So, so I'd love to hear from you. What's your thinking on chatbots? What— how chatbots, how are they going to— will they help more than they will hurt? Is it going to be human? Will this be something we're all going to look forward to?

I think so. I mean, so, you know, this is the whole story about something called conversational user interfaces or conversational user experiences, that the way we're going to engage with our machines is going to be much more natural, much more human. We're going to use voice and gesture, and eventually, Bryan, we're going to be using thought. You know, thought-based interfaces are already on the way. Right. And so, you know, right now we have to engage using these very primitive ways. Our kids are going to laugh, or grandkids, Bryan, I should say, are going to laugh that we used to peck on these little keyboards. When there's much, much more efficient and natural ways to talk to each other. And so these chatbots are about these interfaces, and they can be textual, by the way, but the future clearly is going to be around voice and gesture-based input and other methods. Where we can, in a very highly efficient way, talk to our machines. Now we're doing this every day with Siri and Google Now and Amazon Echo, the little device that has Alexa in there, and you can ask it to do almost anything. You can order a Domino's pizza. You can say, hey, Alexa, order me my favorite Domino's pizza, and that's it. It pays for you, it arranges the order, and even tells you when it's getting close, right? So these interfaces are much easier, and they drive a lot of the friction of engagement around. And you know, you've got your book, Bryan, Human to Human, H2H, and this makes that too, you know, makes that process of engaging with each other much more easy to do. You just talk naturally. So, you know, I think the example I gave you earlier was You know, I could tell Twitter, you know, retweet that last tweet by Bryan and tell him I love his book, right? So, you know, this is the future of digital engagement in so many ways, and then there's going to be machines behind it, artificial intelligence that can interpret, you know, read our language and do those things that we need to have done.

So, how many chatbots are there so far, and how many do you think we'll have even just a year from now?

Well, yeah, the big breakout moment was at F8 when Facebook earlier this year announced Messenger was going to have full chatbot support, and that anyone could build an interface inside Messenger to do whatever you want. You do your banking or whatever, and we see this happening in Asia already with WeChat, which is every service imaginable in Asia is available through these types of very Very convenient interfaces, and right now it's still mostly typing, but I find myself talking more and more to my phone. But the latest numbers, I believe, from the startup industry is that there's over 300 companies building these types of interfaces. Most of them, like most startups, aren't going to go anywhere, but everyone's betting that they're going to be the one that's going to create the ultimate interface, natural language conversational interface in front of us. Siri started out this way. It used to be an app on the iPhone. On the iPhone, and Apple bought it and said, it's so good, we're going to make it the front end of so many of our services. And pretty soon you'll be able to do anything you can do with Apple, you'll be able to do it with Siri.

Wow. Wow. So give me a day where, you know, like for example, you wake up to when you go to bed, how is that potentially going to look in the future?

Well, you're gonna wake up, and if it's, uh, you know, if you parked your car outside and it's a hot day, you know, you're gonna ask your car to say, hey, I'm gonna be outside. When I get ready to go out the front door, make sure you start my car and cool everything down. You can tell your Nespresso maker, you know, that you want it to start making coffee for you. You could say, hey, you know, Do any of my good friends, they mention me on Facebook or Twitter, and if so, read those out to me. And you know, do it, and look inside my fridge and give me a shopping list of what I'm going to need to get tonight. Or actually, never mind, go to TaskRabbit and have someone do that for me, right. And so we're going to be able to use these, use our services much more efficiently. Right now, if you want to do like the connected home thing, you have to shuffle through a ton of different applications to control your light bulbs and your thermostat. They're all from these different vendors. With Apple now opening up Siri to app makers, right, you can now order an Uber just by talking to Siri, right? You can control your entire home. And so right now it seems very unlikely that we're going to open up, you know, when we get home, open up 3 or 4 or 5 apps and adjust all the settings. It's just going to be too time-consuming, right? We can just walk over and do it easier. But with these natural language interfaces, we can remove the friction almost completely and just In a few sentences, we can have everything we want to have done and we can go back to living our lives. And so, that's what they say about great technology is it disappears in the background, right? And this is what these interfaces are eventually going to do. We're just going to behave naturally, and it's going to be a lot more fun to use technology, and we're going to get a lot more use out of all this stuff as well.

How many years away are we from a day like that?

That's a great question. It's coming pretty quickly with the level of investment and the fact that almost all the major services— Amazon has theirs, Google has theirs, Apple has theirs. Everyone's working on this, all right? So now that we're starting to see these technologies opened up to third-party developers, so they're saying it's not just for the big, you know, walled garden services from the big vendors, that anyone can take advantage of it. We're actually not that far. I think if you look at maybe iOS 11 or probably iOS 12, it'll have really matured to the point where we'll have a hard time believing that we used to peck on our little screens most of the time.

Mm-hmm. Okay, so what are the things that you think we should be a little nervous about, about this sort of technology? Is there anything that scares you a little bit?

Well, you know, the thing is, for these things to work, they always have to be on, right? They always have to be listening for your command, right? So they're always listening. You know, I think some of the smart TVs that began to have some of these interfaces in them, I think it was last year. And they said, hey, if you want to talk about something private, you shouldn't do that around your TV because it's always listening to you. I forget the maker. I think it was Samsung. And when Siri first came out, IBM actually required their employees to turn it off because they work with a lot of companies that have very sensitive corporate information. Yeah. And since Siri can be listening all the time, especially if it's plugged in— right now it doesn't listen all the time still, even if it's on battery mode, but back But if you plug it in, it's listening to you all the time waiting for you to do something. So the challenge is, you know, it has even more implications. As big a toll technology is taking on our privacy and our personal lives, this is just yet another tax that I do think we have to watch out for. These interfaces have to be right in the middle of our lives. And now we're looking at companies like IBM's big new push is cognitive collaboration, right, cognitive supported collaboration. And so you're going to be inside your unified communications in your video chat and in your enterprise social network, and these bots will be listening to you. And it's great because, for example, they can listen to a doctor talk to the patient. You know, telemedicine is a big trend, right? It's much easier for older people to visit the doctor via Skype, right? And this is a big thing. Right. And then these smart chatbots can be listening in and whispering in the doctor's ear, hey, you know, I've done a full differential diagnosis while you've been listening, while you've been Talking to this person, and here's a list of things I think that you should be worried about. And so you can have this machine-assisted collaboration that's very high value. IBM is making a big deal about this, but so are many of the other vendors saying these things can aid us in so many ways because they're able to understand us and be a participant. I mean, the meetings of the future are going to be in virtual reality with us talking to both avatars of our of our colleagues, but also avatars of all these chatbots that will be doing all these things on the side for us to support the meeting, providing information, looking things up. You know, I don't have to ask you— sorry, you don't have to ask me how many chatbot startups there are. We could ask, you know, the agent inside this Hangout to go look it up for us, you know, and get back to

us. Do you believe that these chatbots will be programmed to have different personalities?

Absolutely, and this is a big thing now. If you look at some of the chatbot frameworks, so the development, software development community has already been developing SDKs and frameworks to make it easy to create these, and some of them have personality modules, right? So you can get one that has a dry sense of humor. It's kind of like we saw this in the movie Interstellar, where Matthew McConaughey, you know, he had those robots and he had to constantly adjust their humor setting. Yeah. You know, to get it to a place where it was still enjoyable to hang around, but it wasn't unpleasant. So, you know, these types of things are already being baked in. So it's going to go far beyond being able to adjust their voice. You'll be able to actually adjust or select their personality.

I don't know if you saw this yesterday. You've been traveling a bit. My wife The Emmys every year. Wow,

didn't know that.

And the Emmys was yesterday, right? So, and what— but what I was interested in, or what piqued my curiosity, was that one of the movies that made— that won an Emmy was made through the Oculus Rift virtual reality. And so they became yesterday, literally by winning an Emmy, in my mind, a TV channel, which crosses the spectrum not only in virtual reality, but also gives way to artificial intelligence starting to creep into our entertainment. Would you agree with that? Do you think that that's where it's heading? Or do you think that it'll continue just to be straight entertainment and that's it?

So, I don't know if you've used any of the VR goggles. I assume you've put them on.

Here and there, yeah.

Yeah, I thought they were cool when I heard about them, but it wasn't until I put one on and instantly jumped into a real alternative universe, right? You can look in every direction, and the world pans in real time. It's like you're there. You know, you can look straight up, straight down, behind you, and you're in a different place, right? And so, I had never seen anything so seamless and immersive, right? So, it completely replaces your visual reality, right? Yeah. So, it's great for entertainment, right? But does it have work purposes? Absolutely. You know, and so we see this moving into telepresence, you know, and there's some— a company called Double Robotics already makes a work robot that allows you to attend meetings. It's not VR, but it's going to be. I mean, they're working on it. But allow you to literally be in another place and be able to travel around that office And collaborate. And they have lots of good data showing that the level of engagement is much higher than when you have like a regular Skype video call, when you're able to control the robot and go around. And a number of the clients I work with have actually had these in pilots so that you can save a business-class airfare for a senior executive. He can just fire up his iPad and roam around the office and attend meetings. And his head-sized video is on the iPad screen on the other side, right, on that robot. So it's moving much faster on the entertainment side, but it's gonna be a big business thing, especially as the equipment gets smaller. Right now it's too bulky, it's very primitive. It looks like the first cell phones. These VR glasses are like the first cell phones, but pretty soon they're going to disappear into our glasses and contacts.

Wow, wow. Um, you know, I, I haven't even asked for questions yet, and normally I have to ask for them in order for them to start coming in because people are so intently listening, but you already have like a whole stack of questions coming in. So just to remind everybody out there, if you do have a question about chatbots or artificial intelligence, we've kind of just creeped into virtual reality. I snuck that one in, but we're gonna be talking about chatbots— Right. And artificial intelligence here today with Dion Hinchcliffe. And we have a real special opportunity to really dive into something that I think is gonna be bigger than than most things that we've seen in the last 20 or 30 years. So this is certainly going to change. So ask your questions on #H2HChat, and I'll go ahead and take those on the second half. If you're new to this, you can do that on Twitter, #H2HChat. That's number 2. So Dion, question around how easy or hard is it People out there, is my son going to learn how to do this and build his own chatbot or artificial intelligence of some kind, or is this going to come from professional companies that build these things that really make it work? Well, I mean, is this like an app developer kind of thing, or?

I think, I mean, that all of this is very modular. Technology has proceeded to the point where Almost anyone can code. You saw with the Apple announcement when they launched the iPhone 7, they had, you know, the Everyone Can Code campaign, right? Coding has been reduced in terms of difficulty so that almost anyone can do it. I mean, we live in the Minecraft era where everyone wants to build things, right? Everyone's taught from a very young age that you can use digital tools to assemble anything. I mean, so much of coding today is just, you know, integrating software together, and even that process is literally just pushing it together now. So I think that people are going to have, you know, they'll be able to choose the kinds of bots they want. They'll be very configurable. Most people aren't going to be writing their own artificial intelligence. They're going to be building on, you know, common open-source frameworks for this kind of thing, and then plugging this into their apps and then their ideas. And, you know, we see like Apple has their Swift programming language that pretty much anyone can learn. Yeah. to write and create apps in. Wow. Google has their own, you know, their own language. So everyone's trying to reduce the difficulty because so much value is unlocked by technology, because it can automate things for you, do things for you, and it's a force multiplier. That's why we had this, you know, this great rise in productivity since the industrial age, is these machines do all these things, but they don't tie us up anymore. So these AI interfaces allow us to set our ideas free. We just describe the idea, and the AI algorithm can go do whatever that is. That's the power. That's really high leverage.

Is there any reason to get out of bed?

Well, this is the other— I mean, I was on SiriusXM Radio with the Wharton School the other day, and this is what we were talking about. The endgame is pretty clear now. This is what, you know, Andrew McAfee of MIT, you know, we're in the twilight probably of traditional human work, that most things, not everything, but most things will be done by computers. So what's left for us to do, right? So it's going to change our economic systems, it's going to change a lot of things. That's still maybe 15, 20 years out.

Yeah, I didn't warn you that if you use the word human, this happens. So this is H2H chat, which is ironic, we're sitting here talking about Chatbots. So anytime you say human, that's going to happen. Now you've been warned. Okay, so this is called H2H chat. Is it possible for chatbots to talk to each other and bring value?

Yes, I think— Yeah, no question. I mean, there's chatbots make it easy for us to communicate with each other to some degree, because, you know, we can now say, tell all my friends that I have scheduled meetings with today that I'm out sick, right? Now you're still— it'll go check your chatbot, will check your calendar, go look up all their email addresses and find some channel to confirm that, you know, they know that you won't be in the office, right? And then you can go back, you can turn over and go back to sleep. If you're sick. So, you know, it's going to help human-to-human communication for sure, right? And then it's also absolutely chatbot— Nice. It's also going to help machine-to-machine communication, because we'll be able to— my mortgage shopping chatbot can talk to the mortgage banker chatbot and they can figure out most of my house deal for me, and I only have to bring them in for the things my chatbot is not sure about, you know. So, and those sorts of things happen in a primitive fashion now, but we're using these pokey interfaces where we click with a mouse and we type stuff in. Well, the chatbots are just one added layer where they know all that information. They can fill out those forms. They can do all that. They can push the button for us. And so all that— and that's happening. Right. You know, but right now we only have simple use cases. I can tell Siri to send a text message to my wife that I'm going to be home late, you know, but That's still, that's better than nothing.

So, so you just domestic thing that we're solving here too, because you remember when TiVo came out, how a commercial would, would, or sorry, not even a commercial, but a movie would play right at that one moment, the pivotal moment, and then somebody in your house would talk. And you'd miss it. And there was no way of going back to hear what they said. And TiVo came out and I think they, they, they cut the divorce rate down in massive percentages because people could actually pause it and talk to their wife or husband without getting mad at them. So I'm wondering if this is yet another evolution of you go talk to my wife or go talk to her chatbot. They're going to, they're going to solve the problem and there'll be even less problems. Between— and we will just go eat at the restaurant that we both— that our chatbots decided for us.

Well, I didn't think about that, but that's probably very true, that what they'll be is a buffer for the unpleasant engagement, right? Right. So we're still going to want to— you know, we're human, right? So we want— we naturally want to talk to people when it's a pleasant experience, right? We want to catch up with our friends.

When it's pleasant, right.

But we don't want to nag our husbands and wives and Or you have those difficult conversations. Yeah, you can negotiate that with these new— yeah. So yeah, there actually is a few people have actually developed replacements for basically the psychiatrist, the chatbot that can actually help you work through your problems. So you can also talk to yourself.

Yeah. Wow. Still, opportunities are endless. When— with— so there's chatbots everywhere, potentially.

They're already around us. I mean, they've already started to surround us. They're just in primitive form right now.

Correct. So if they exist in Facebook Messenger or they exist in Siri or they exist in our devices around the house, who is going to connect all of this so it's seamless? Where does, where does it lie? Who owns the brain of this thing that becomes kind of your consistency across all the devices that are out there so that it's not a new chatbot here and a new chatbot here, it's all connected for you?

Well, and this is the challenge. So, you know, there's 2 downsides here. One is we're kind of outsourcing a lot of our low-level decision-making and work to these machines. We don't really know where Siri runs or where Google Now executes, and we don't know if they're going to be around forever, but we're becoming more and more dependent on them. And same thing with like Google Search. You know, it's been theorized that if Google went away tomorrow that, you know, many people's lives would cease to operate well because we use that as our memory bank now. We don't even bother to remember facts. They've actually done studies saying that when we want to know something, we know we can just Google it. You know, and get the information. And so we're going to become more and more dependent on these. That's one of the other downsides you were mentioning, what's the risk here?

Right.

But it's a trade-off like all this, you know, if you are willing to become more dependent then they'll do more for you. But yeah, the big players are all building their own conversational interface ecosystems. They want to be the one trusted agent that can bring all of these things together for you and instrument and orchestrate them for you and have them do your bidding. But right now it's a competitive issue, right? So, you know, nothing will— no one service will do everything yet. Yeah. Now, will someone figure that out? Maybe. Will the— you know, now with Apple opening up Siri to third-party developers, you know, it's going to give them more power, but now it's also going to let other people create things on top of that or with that. We'll see, it might be now possible to co-opt it, but I'm almost certain that, you know, the Apples, the Googles, and the Amazons are all hoping to be ultimately the winner, the one conversational agent that will do everything, or most of everything you need.

Yeah, yeah, right. What do you think will be most used and something we never saw coming? Like it's going to help us in this way that we never even imagined.

Well, I mean, I've given some good examples. You know, I think like having these experts join our digital conversation and enriching them, right? You know, I don't think most people are even ready for that, but it's coming. It's going to be a big thing. But I think that more and more of the complicated, the complex and important services, you know, the things like buying a house, the example I gave, those complicated but very painful processes, there's going to be a big demand to make that easier.

Right.

Help me do something very hard, right? And so we'll see it start in simple things like trip planning, right? You know, a chatbot that knows your travel history and all your preferences, and it can spend, you know, it can be the unblinking eye to evaluate every single fun thing you can do on your vacation, right?

Yeah.

And then give you the shortlist saying, look, I looked at everything. I mean, I don't know how many times I've visited an area and then heard later about something I wish I had gone to because I just didn't have the time to look at every conceivable option, right? And sometimes you miss some really great experiences. So we're going to see that kind of, you know, the thing that they can offer is unlimited amounts of computational time to meet your needs, right? So we're going to have every whim catered to, right?

Yeah.

And it's going to be great in that respect.

So it's interesting because, you know, I'm throwing these futuristic, like, you know, probabilities out at you, and still, you know, I come I just, not too long ago, and I came home and it was cool because, you know, it saw on my phone because of proximity that the lights were going to turn on because I was home. That was awesome. And then, then we had like thought about what we're gonna do for dinner and I was gonna go get dinner and just bring it back. So I did. The problem is that when I drove away from the house, it shut all the lights off and everyone was, everyone was still home. And so I got some text messages real fast on that one saying, come back. So it's, it's like, you know, these little, um, things that, um, that are missing from even just this, this, this simple, you know, little example. I would imagine they're gonna have that kind of stuff sorted out, but it's just funny to see that technology really still is reliant upon your rule set and you have to work Yeah, and

well, there is an issue with complexity that at some point, you know, the idea is this should reduce complexity by moving it behind the chatbot, right? So we don't have to do so much of the work, but there's the law of unintended consequences, right, with so much technology. And I think that, yeah, because of the complexity, there's more unintended consequences, and we are going to discover those.

Great, great. Well, we've just got 2 more minutes here, and then I'm going to start giving you some questions from the audience. You've got a lot of great questions coming in here that I'm going to just turn around and ask you, but feel free if you guys out there have more, even if we don't get to them, we can, we can certainly get them to—

Yeah, and I'll take a look at the hashtag later today and answer as many as I can.

Oh, great, great. Thank you for doing that. All right, so yeah, definitely keep your— yeah, here's another one that just came in from Bill. So where does this put companies working together when they're starting to think about artificial intelligence? Nobody really has just one solution. Nobody is just using an IBM There's always bigger complexities at play. How are you seeing 2 different, 3 different companies coming together, or are they yet, to fulfill like an artificial intelligence against the— or a chatbot against the software stack that companies are using? You know what I mean? Because it's never just one solution, it's always a mixed deliverable, if you will.

Yeah. One place where you can see this happening right now in a big way is inside a software product that's exploding right now. It's a collaboration tool called Slack. Yeah. And many of you probably have heard of Slack, but the chatbot phenomenon really exploded, I think, probably most prominently there. There's more fascinating chatbots. One of my favorite ones is a scheduling chatbot. I can tell it Go and find— go negotiate with Bill and Tom a good meeting time over the next week. And it goes and looks at their calendars. If it can't get enough information from there, it goes and emails them and actually asks them in text, hey, can you move this meeting around so that Diane can meet with you, you know? And so there's many very interesting, very advanced chatbots inside the Slack ecosystem, and because Slack has opened it up, anyone can contribute their artificial intelligence algorithm, their natural language processing algorithm, and so we're seeing kind of this economy, this chatbot economy growing there. There's hundreds of them now just in Slack, and I encourage anyone who really wants to play around with them, they work wonderfully because of the command line kind of nature. ask your chatbot in these little tiny bits of text what you want it to go do, and it will go do it for you. And so we're seeing that that's one model, right? And then Messenger, Facebook has their own, you know, you'll be able to create your own Messenger channel and anyone will be able to talk to it. I now see large companies looking to automate customer service that way, so you'll see an official, you know, Acme Company A customer service bot, and you'll be able to talk to it. Now, we've already seen these interfaces. We've seen chat interfaces that have machine learning on them, natural language processing already. But now Facebook is going to really centralize that and kind of be the clearinghouse for where to find these things, right? I want to go get support for this. I want to go buy that. I want to talk to somebody first. It's often more efficient to have the machine do it for you. So we're seeing it. Yeah. primitive right now, these ecosystems forming. And I think that was— I think Facebook's announcement and the success Slack has had probably forced Apple to open up. They're not sometimes always very excited to open up their environment. Remember, they didn't even want the App Store, but they got so many people jailbreaking the phone to put their own apps on it, they finally said, we better get out ahead of this. Yeah. And so I think the same thing is happening there. There's real market forces now because of the benefits that you can get.

Oh man, it's endless. I remember when my wife was pregnant and she said she could really, like, she was just a month away from having our son. And so I was, she said, I really could use some ice cream. And it was 11 o'clock at night. And I was like, oh man, I went to the store and got the ice cream, but I ended up getting the wrong ice cream. And then I took a— I went back and I took a picture of the right ice cream. And then we went up to the cashier and there was 3 of us standing there with ice cream. And we all knew like that we're all there getting ice cream for our pregnant wives. But, you know, I can only imagine like in times of like when you really need something and it's just, you know, it would be really nice to have ice cream. ice cream of this kind delivered to you, you know, and, and this kind of stuff is available now, but through a chatbot, it takes it to the next level. Because you can do all that, you just, you don't, you're, it's all human related. It's a human chain of events that makes that happen.

Right. Well, I remember, you know, think about how it was, I think it was sometime in the mid-'90s, somebody created the first webpage where you could order a pizza. And people laughed at that, right? They go, you know, that's just You know, silly, why would you want to do that? But I haven't ordered a pizza by calling someone on the phone in years. I mean, you know, I always use an app for that, and pretty soon there'll be a bot for that, right? Yeah, right. So that's really the next shift, is there's gonna be a bot for that. Why are you gonna— why use an app? Just jump onto Facebook Messenger and tell them what you want, you know?

That's awesome. There's that. Okay, so Let's dive into some questions here. Keep the questions coming. I'll try to get to all of them. Would love, love to hear, hear everything that you, you have for, for him here. I'm going to start off with Jason Martin. He said, do chatbots— will chatbots, or do chatbots make humans more lazy? How far do we take this before we become full-time couch potatoes? That was kind of a little bit what I was laughing about before, but I'll let you answer that.

Yeah, sure. So all technology makes us lazy, and programmers, you know, there's a famous saying, the most creative, most effective programmer is the laziest one, because instead of doing it the hard way, he's going to write a program to do it for him, and it might take a little bit of work up front to do that, but then he never has to do that unpleasant task again, right? And some of that is true here, and, you know, it's up to us. You know, I personally would use my chatbots Free up time so I can go hiking. So that's not— I don't think that's laziness. I think that's a smart use of time. I want to use my technology more efficiently, more naturally, and I want to have a better time doing it. You know, I hate when I'm out for a walk and I'm sitting there, I'm going through my news apps, going through my Twitter app, going through my email, and I realized I just spoiled a nice walk to where I was going instead of enjoying the outdoors, instead of saying— Let me know if there's any important emails, and remember, make sure to retweet Bryan Kramer every day, right? That's, you know, that's what I want. I don't— I want to spend my time doing what I want, whether that's sitting on the couch or taking a hike, right? And I think this is what all technology does, is it gives us the choice we didn't have before.

Right. Yeah. Well, it's only a matter of time before We can really be in 2 places at once.

Well, and there are people working on chatbots that will do what you— there'll be the Bryan Kramer chatbot.

Yeah, yeah.

They'll do 80% of what you can do. And then when they can't, it goes, you need to talk to the real Bryan Kramer.

So that becomes an old saying because we really can be in 2 places at once.

Yeah, or even call 1,000 places at once. This is the thing, right? You can suddenly, you know, there really are— I have to look this up, I'll tweet it out later— companies that will teach a chatbot how to have your personality, and then you can, you can turn on whatever services you want. It's amazing, right? So, you know, this, and this is still early days, right?

Man, I want a chatbot that has sarcasm.

Yeah, exactly.

I think that would be awesome.

Well, you know, I don't know if you've played around with the Messenger, the new iMessage App Store, but there's, uh, they have these humor bots, right, that allow you— one, someone will talk to you and tell you funny things. The other one will give you a humorous weather report. You can adjust the humor. There's all this stuff that's already— I didn't even know about that.

How do you How do you get access to the Messenger App Store?

The iMessage App Store. If you go into your iPhone, go to iMessage, and there's a little App Store icon, and now you can get all these services, including chatbot services, to plug right into iMessage. Yeah, you can play tic-tac-toe, you can invite a group chat, and then the chatbot will facilitate a game or a trivia game.

No way!

Anything you want. Oh yeah, no.

All right, this is the new iOS you're talking about, probably.

iOS 10 with iMessage, and it has the built-in App Store, and you can plug in— they don't have a lot of bots yet, but they do have some really, really cool ones you can play with.

All right, I know what I'm doing after we get off.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so Jimmy Bearden asked, how much will trust play into the usage of Chatbots. Well,

it's always a big thing, right? So Google had to use PageRank, you know, that used to be able to— I think you still can see what the absolute ranking of a page is, how trustworthy a page is, right? You know, this is back before people, you know, really were sure about, you know, a certain website. Now people kind of develop trust through, you know, Google tends to give the right answers better than other search engines, and so it developed trust over years, it built it up. By being very, very accurate and mostly not misusing the information that people gave to it. Because sometimes your search can reveal a lot of really important things like the state of your health in particular, right? Your searches can give away a lot of important information, and Google has proven to be pretty good at that information. It knows who's got what out there basically, right? You know, who's got what diseases. That information is incredibly sensitive and valuable to the right people. But they've been very good with that, and so this is why I think that, you know, there will develop again these well-known bot services. I think this is why Facebook is saying, well, we're going to be able to kind of, you know, kind of sort through and rule the Wild West so it's not so crazy. But it's, again, it's early days. I think we're going to have to have the Apple App Store equivalent, you know, you're going to want to only use a bot that's been scrutinized by a third party to make sure that it doesn't Right. Misuse information, because that's a real risk. You go to a medical diagnosis chatbot, which are very common, they've been— medicine's had chatbots for diagnosis going back to the 1980s, right?

Yeah.

So that doctors without any computer skills can very quickly get computer-assisted diagnostics, right?

Right, yeah.

But now anyone's going to be able to do that, but that again is very sensitive information. So yeah, we're going to see kind of a new trust ecosystem evolve. And the people in position to really create that are the big vendors, the Googles, the Apples, the Amazons.

Yeah. Oh, man. You know, the amount of time that I spend, and I have a support team, in fact, most of them are even watching here, a great group of people that I count on to do a lot of different things. But the movement of information that happens between all of us, and not just us, but also external clients and, you know, just communication and how it travels back and forth is, is never, um, you know, even as much as I, I love these people to death, it's, it's never perfect because, um, one piece of information always gets missed, uh, somewhere. You know, we're only human, as they say, and so we, we, we, we, we may miss something in translation or whatever. Um, the nice thing about chatbots is that they're— they, they Are literal. I mean, you input and they output. Do you think that accuracy will play a huge role here going forward?

Well, again, it's the law of unintended consequences, especially when you can mistype something and the machine can misunderstand you, even though the accuracy now is surprisingly high. Still, bad things are going to happen. You're going to order 100 pizzas. You know, until someone figures out to put the governor on the app, you know, when you didn't mean to order that, you actually ordered for something else that sounded like 100 pizzas. So, you know, you're going to have those kinds of issues because they give you so much power, right? Yeah. You have to use great power wisely, and it can also be misused accidentally, and you have tremendous consequences. So I think, you know, they're going to put safety nets on this technology, but You know, again, when you accidentally, you know, ordered 5, you know, laptops on Amazon in an unintended way, because now you can order things on Amazon through Alexa, you know, very simply, and ask it the status, you know, when's my package of Apple AirPods going to arrive? And it'll just tell you, right?

Yeah.

So we'll see what happens.

But if it was snarky enough to say, I hope you don't lose them.

Well, that would be awesome. I think no question personality modules are going to be, you know, like we were talking about Interstellar, you're going to be able to adjust the humor level, right? The sarcasm level of your chatbot, you know.

Totally. That's where the beauty comes in for me. Um, okay, so, uh, Gary McIntyre—

This is the part about— I said about being more fun. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

No, go ahead. What's that?

And this is what I'm saying, is that this is those kinds of things that will make digital engagement more fun and less transactional, right? More human. I said the human word again.

There it goes. So Gary McIntyre said, how will chatbots incorporate— be incorporated into search? Will they respond to, in quotes, find someone providing this service That I will, I will get along with. I'm not sure exactly that I'll get along with. I'm not, I'm not sure. But search, finding like a product or a service, maybe, maybe the context there is the compatibility of 2 people. How will a chatbot know that if you say, I want to find a person who does X, Y, Z, is compatible with the service and personality and everything that we go through to find and match and work with each other? Does that make sense?

Yep, so let's take that in 2 parts. First, will we be able to use chatbots to search? Absolutely, we can do that today. You can ask Siri to search the web for whatever you want. That's done, right? Now it's the intelligent layers on top of that that are still coming. You know, you need this contextual machine learning, a machine learning algorithm that learns about you and what your tastes are, or some way of teaching it, you know, what you like and what you don't like. And then you need something smart enough to extrapolate, hey, you know, if he hates all blue food, let's make sure we never order blue food for him, right. You know, I'm referring to the old George Carlin joke, but you need to have a chatbot that you have a relationship with that knows your personality, knows your likes and dislikes, and how you do things, right. And so those are still in development, all right, so but we've had, you know, social shopping. algorithms for the last 10 years. I can't believe how many services that have existed saying, hey, you know, if your friends like something, there's a good chance data shows that you'll like something too. Let me present it to you, right? So we've had these kinds of algorithms in our lives, but no one's really kind of packaged them all together. Now Google is in a really good position because they're the search leader. They already have, especially on their mobile devices, they have these these bot agents, you can talk to your Android phone and have it search and do all these things. What it's missing is that artificial intelligence piece, and that's why a smart bot is a much better bot, because it can learn about you, it can also exhibit the kind of human characteristics that we find so rewarding about engagement, so it can have humor and sarcasm on top of that, it's another layer of complexity on top of that, and so we have these really enjoyable highly leveraged interfaces that will do that. But right now, we're in early days. So, first part, we're doing it. Second part, no, we need more machine learning, more contextual understanding of us as people baked into these services. But all that's coming. People are working on that right now.

You know, it's interesting, and I'm going to— don't worry, I'll get back to a couple more questions here. But this is fascinating, because in that movie Her, which I actually do agree with personally, you know, this, this is a— this phone in that movie goes away and all it becomes is just the eyes of what the personal assistant wants you to hear. But this exists no more. The real, the real piece is that earpiece. And ironically, it looks just like the Apple AirPods. Yes. And the chatbot is what's driving every decision you make through the earbuds. And so what they just did really was just identically mold to everything that we saw in that movie. And so we're almost like here with them.

Yes.

Say that again?

Science fiction is just an attempt to predict the future, and it's often a very good attempt, right? You know, most of these, you know, most of these authors and these scriptwriters are looking at saying, all right, if we took the trajectory of everything, what, where is this going to take us? And can I show that picture? I think Her is an exact example of exactly what Siri and Windows and all of these interfaces are going to turn into. And, you know, I think just like you said, this right here, this is a primitive intermediate step, even though it's radically advanced compared to 10 years ago. Yeah. It's a primitive intermediate step. These are going to go away. And, you know, pretty soon we will barely see the computers because they're going to be wired into our ears. We'll be able to look out through our contact lenses. You know, they've already figured out how to power the contact lenses that can give you the virtual reality. It can be powered through now a Bluetooth low-energy interface. They already have those in the labs. So yeah, all this stuff is going to be so tiny and very lethal.

My thesis was around computers that wouldn't need physical existence other than a monitor. And so my thesis is now just screaming.

I have an iMac.

Yeah, yeah, right. Okay, so Alan Berkson, actually he's got two questions. I'll try to get back to your second one, Alan. But he said, putting putting Dion on the spot, who in the world will be standing in five years?

Sorry, repeat the question. I dropped out right now.

Sure, no problem. He said, who in the chatbot world? will be standing in 5 years?

No question that it's going to be the channel enablers, right. It's going to be Facebook Messenger, right. It's going to be the Siri ecosystem. Those guys are going to be around. Slack will still be standing almost certainly. They'll probably be bigger, much bigger than they are today. So you're looking at the folks that have these big stable ecosystems that are adding those services in, right? They're going to have it, even though they're not— they only have some chatbots of their own, they're primarily going to enable the millions of others, just like the Apple App Store has enabled millions of others, but Apple has the apps probably that are most used. So we're going to see this, we're going to see that continuing dominance from these top players as they try and be the place people put these smart bots, and so there's no question. Now, in terms of smaller players, I mean, you can't say anything yet. It's very early days. Most of these startups have been created in the last year, you know, the hundreds that we mentioned. So from there, I can't predict. Most of them won't be around in 5 years, put it like that.

Yeah, it's like anything else, right? You know, I think It's always fun when an industry explodes like that and lots of people come onto the scene, but eventually you shake the tree and, you know, the strong limbs and leaves end up standing. And it's no different than real estate or anything else that we've been through, but exciting nonetheless, because that means that there is a lot of opportunity and a lot of new invention that's coming, which is— I absolutely love. I'm a geek like that. I know you are too.

Yeah, well, I'm— Yeah, exactly. Well, I was— my wife is— I was trying to describe all this to my wife and she's like, the last thing I want to do is spend more time in Facebook Messenger. What are you talking about? Right? So, I mean, we can't forget we're— it's a bunch of geeks building this little world for ourselves, right? Right. Yeah. So most likely, I think it's the next big thing. It's just that, you know, we have to be careful what we ask for. Are we going to be suddenly doing almost all of our engagement through these experiences? Probably. Yeah, but I spend too much time on the computer already.

Right. Well, if it can be less computer, that'd be awesome. And in fact, this next question kind of plays into exactly what we're talking about. Bill, hopefully I get your name, last name right, Skoronski, I believe that's how you say it. Does AI think for us, for us, or does it think like us?

Well, the— I mean, it really depends on the algorithm, right? So it could do both, right? It's one or the other, or could do both. The, you know, there's an argument about whether we've ever really created anything that will think truly on its own, right? You know, is this machine learning just really just clever algorithms, or do we, you know, is there— are the machines truly thinking for themselves and thinking of things we wouldn't think of, you know, that's kind of the proof point. And so there are some algorithms and some, you know, there's certain tests, you know, the most famous being the Turing test saying, you know, can we actually ensure, can we see if these things truly are intelligent and able to think on their own? And for most tasks, you don't really need to do that, right? And certainly some of the algorithms that they use a neural net based algorithm, they are thinking kind of like us, at least at a low level. And there are other heuristics that try to mimic human thinking and human reasoning. You know, fuzzy logic is one that most people have at least heard of.

Yeah.

It's kind of a way of mimicking biological thinking systems, right, in digital systems. So really, like I said, it actually does really depend on the algorithm, but we're, you know, on the very advanced stage, do we have truly emergent thinking? truly innovative thinking on its own. I'm not even sure those questions are that important for us to get the most, most of the value that we're talking about here, but certainly that's going to happen, and then it's unclear, you know, what will happen after that.

Right. There's only so far we can, we can forecast here. So, so the, the question that I'm getting here from Aldo Maragoni is a good guy here in San Jose, by the way. He said the more dependent on AI and chatbots, the more it'll do for you. But that is also the biggest question. How dependent do we want to become and will allow? It's kind of— it's— Do you believe that that's up to each person, or do you think that there will be like this wild acceptance on certain things, and you just don't realize it. Where do you think the acceptance level will be?

Well, I think that if you look back, let's say someone from 30 years ago was transported into the way that we live now, and they saw how already terribly dependent on our computers we are today, right, they would be appalled, right, at how much control over our lives that we give, you know, the I'm not even sure I know how to pay my bills the old traditional way, right? You know, I guess they still mail them to me, but I don't really know that, you know. Yeah. And so there's all these things that we do today. So this is— technology is always a two-edged sword, right? It gives with one, but you can also have negative consequences. But let's not forget, these devices are extensions of ourselves. We created them, right? So This is the whole kind of transhumanism. We're not really— we're only dependent upon us still, right? We created them, you know, to make life easier for us. Yeah. And so, the thing is, as long as the trade-offs are worth it, I think it's fine. It's when things break down, right? You know, this is why, you know, right now cyberterrorism doesn't affect most of us, but it really could in the future, right? You know, losing access to our banking systems, for example, would be crippling to us personally and economically. I mean, I barely use cash anymore. I'm very dependent on Apple Pay and my credit cards when I travel. But if that's not available anymore, now I've become overdependent. So I think especially in the United States, we're very quick to change. It's amazing. I go to older societies. I travel around the world quite a bit. And when I go to older societies, they change much more slowly. You still go to Germany and they Credit cards are hard to take. A lot of companies, a lot of businesses won't take them. They still do— they pay for everything in cash, right? You know, and that's a very advanced society, right? So I think it's, you know, we do— I think as long as we have to continue questioning whether we're moving too fast and whether we're, you know, becoming too dependent, but it's a good question to ask.

You know, it's funny because while we're sitting here talking, There's some laugh, some some. There's a funny tweet that that rolled out from. I'm trying to see who it was. Here it is from Leslie Henry. She said during the H2H chat how many of us were followed by bots on Twitter. I got this one exactly

right,

and it's funny. I've had bots actually retweeting or tweeting me more. because I'm using the word bot than I normally do.

Yes, right.

Which is so ironic, and I think a good place to close to how impersonal it can also get. And, you know, so I'd love to— like, maybe you can talk towards that. Like, how does the impersonal side matter if the job is getting done?

Well, I mean, I think if you're— if it's work, that it doesn't matter as much, you know, but the thing is, you know, we do have to be careful not to lose what makes us human and what makes us, you know, want to be human, right, which is, you know— Which is real genuine contact, you know, meaningful engagement with each other. The miracle of technology though is You know, I have way more contacts and friends and conversations than I ever did before all this social stuff happened, right?

Yeah.

And I maintain these long-lived relationships with people I would have fallen out of contact with years ago. But it's good. I mean, I actually, you know, Alvin Toffler, the guy that wrote Future Shock, predicted this. He says, we're gonna have a lot more relationships in the future, but they're gonna be shallower. I think that's probably right. And I don't know if it's necessarily a bad thing, but there has been a change. I do think we have to make sure we pay attention to those things. Yeah. But yeah, there's an absolute risk that we're all by ourselves in a room and we don't even seek human contact, right? We're happy just to have all these devices around with us. And I think, you know, the French say that people don't go to cafes anymore because they can engage online. Right. Cafe culture is starting to die. Literally, there was a real concern about something that they really cherish. Because it's too much work to go down the street to the cafe when you can just pick up your smartphone, right?

You know, when the pub starts dying in the UK, then we got issues.

Yeah, exactly right.

Let's

hope

not. Now we're all like, what? So, um, so, so tell everybody where they can learn more about you, uh, where can they find you, and, um, uh, and, and what's a good place to, to, to ask you questions?

Yep, so you can see my Twitter handle on the screen, @dhinchcliffe. That's almost always the better, best way to get a hold of me. I let anyone direct message me, so, but trying, you know, open channels are always the best. I'm Chief Strategy Officer for Seven Summits, that's sevensummitsinc.com, where we build, design and build highly engaging communities for the world's largest brands. And you can find me on ZDNet. I regularly kind of track all the things we're talking about here. And finally, @dianhinchcliffe .com is where you can track my other blogs about the cutting edge of technology. I look forward to chatting with you online.

And I'm sorry it took till the end for me to learn the correct pronunciation of your first name. Oh yeah, you're welcome. So, so I wanted to thank you so much for being on the show. Not only was this brilliant, but I've had conversations, for anyone who doesn't know him, out there. We've talked at IBM events. He's one of the influencers at the events, and they are— I always enjoy talking to you. You always bring such incredible thinking that it just makes me kind of spin around and go, what? I can't believe that's even possible. So I thank you for being here, especially since you're traveling. And is there anything else that you want to say before we go?

Nope, just, I mean, I really appreciate you having me on. I mean, you do such great work bringing all of these ideas to the world and spreading the knowledge, and I really appreciate that and looking forward to seeing you online.

You got it. 2 quick announcements. One, my personal branding course closes today, so it's a little bit of a self-hype, if you will, but hey, it's my show, I can say certain things, right? So personal branding course is going to close the doors tonight. I think we have 10 spots left. Sure. So I'm gonna send out the next email in just a minute. And I've gotten a lot of different responses of people that are gonna sign up. So make sure you grab your seat before they do, if you're kind of on the fence on that. And next Monday, we're gonna have Ryan Bell. And if you don't know Ryan Bell, he hosts live— the live video event that happens annually. He had one in New York. year ago and one in San Francisco last year. He's gonna have one in London coming up. It's all about live video and virtual reality. He is really, really smart on this— this shit, how's that? He's really smart on this stuff. So hope you guys can join us next Monday for live video straight from the guy that actually is running the conferences around this stuff. So there's that. Thanks once again for being with us today. Really appreciate you all for being on another H2H chat, and we will see you again next Monday. Cheers!