EXCLUSIVE:
API.ai, an intelligent speech interface company for apps, devices, and the web is announcing an integration with Slack that could be a major stepping stone in deepening Slack’s usefulness in the enterprise beyond chat. The AI startup has been around building speech products using machine learning for six years now and actually launched the first app speech assistant (assistant.ai) even before Siri — where it now has 30+ million subscribers and a higher rating than all the other major voice assistants in market (Google, Siri, Nuance, etc.). API.ai has made what could be an awesome feature for Slack: a developer tool to create truly conversational bots that rely on NLP (natural language processing) in seconds.
Bots are the new apps
Conversational interfaces have been around for some time. Do you remember SmarterChild? Every teen of the AOL Instant messaging generation should. You could ask him (at least, I always thought it was a him) for movie times and weather in your area. You could ask him about his favorite song or food. ‘He’ was a brilliant time-waster, and in general, kind of a parlor trick.
*It was an often hilarious parlor trick, if I recall — and what a precursor for what’s coming this year in chat.
The rapidly expanding chat app and messenger market is anything however, a trick. In fact, messaging apps have recently surpassed social networks for monthly active users. In the research game, when we see major markets intersect like this, there are significant macro forces at play — and the results ripple throughout every wave of the innovation economy that supports it. In this case, that means investors and entrenched players in messaging. Slack is a big part of this economy on the enterprise side, at least in terms of potential future (over) value. They even launched their own venture fund to push this wave forward.
There’s rumblings of Facebook kicking the tires of a bot ecosystem through Messenger. Kik did so the previous year and is already seeing massive growth.
The fundamental thinking around the bot ecosystem’s opportunity flies directly in the face of what’s happening with mobile phone engagement. Somewhere around 90% of a mobile phone user’s time is spent on email, their preferred social network, and messaging. That’s not to say apps are dead — however, the windows of opportunity for competing for a mobile user’s attention outside of those ‘big 3’ apps is shrinking. It’s the driving force for the $100B+ mobile app enabler ecosystem we’ve been covering at VB Insight.
Bots are also going to be a big reason why ‘single use’ apps will be a thing of the past. When you go to Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, you can have food brought straight to you via the Levi’s Stadium food delivery app. Great. Now I've to get out my phone, search for the app, put in my password, create an account, add my credit card…
Wouldn’t it be cooler just to chat with ‘Levi bot?’
That’s sort of how API.ai functions. The main benefits of using it over other chat bots is that there’s no need for users to memorize commands. API.ai driven bots can support multi-step/clarifying comments, making chats more contextual. It’s also super easy to build them with no coding required. I built one with CEO Illya Gelfenbeyn over the phone in a minute or two.
The company has deep expertise in the enterprise with other AI products in various stages of production. They have large clients in IoT (which they couldn’t disclose who, however, alluded to major players in smart home hubs, wearables, and coming-soon competitors to Amazon’s Echo device), TV set top boxes, voice-enabled mobile apps, in-car voice interactions, enterprise solutions (CRM, Warehouse management, etc.), and even robots — having processed over 2.7 billion API requests so far with 20k+ developers working on adding voice or text interaction capabilities to their products.
This is a critical differentiator for them. So yes, while it’s neat you can order a Lyft via Slack (actually, that’s not neat at all), imagine how much money a company could save in employee on-boarding, for instance, by automating the process via chat? API.ai has been working with enterprise resource management tools and CRM systems already to make this a reality.
Entire business workflows can be viewed and coordinated inside of the messaging platform. Slack can maybe fulfill its lofty promise to redefine the way we work and communicate. The Silicon Valley is experiencing a growth vs. monetization dialectic as of late. The early outcomes of that argument have been massive public markdowns, and some less-than-rosy news for tech workers this year.
Slack has firmly been on the ‘growth’ end of that spectrum. There’s already plenty of trough of disillusionment fodder on that topic as well. What will pull Slack out of it? AI that works.
This post on the Mixpanel blog provides an excellent framework for the main components of the bot-opportunity, and how Kik is seeing massive engagement and growth on it already. If you’re interested in this space, you should go read the whole thing.