According to a report from The Information, Google is going to announce its take on messaging bots at I/O tomorrow. Unlike competing efforts from Facebook, developers will be able to build bots for different messaging services using Google’s tools.
We’ve recently argued that the Galaxy S7 edge may represent the culmination of the “Smartphone 1.0 era”. It won’t please everyone about everything — and no such thing will likely ever exist — but it’s indubitable how all of the cornerstones of a modern smartphone have been tackled cleverly by the Korean giant, and all its positives can even justify its hefty price tag. Actually delivering something that steps up the game in a significant way, in fact, looks like a very tough challenge. Perhaps we will have to wait until true, Project Ara-like modular smartphones show up before radically rethinking the way we look at hardware, but the software roadmap seems to be getting clearer, with a future studded with bots.
Microsoft is betting big on them as a major part of the future of computing, and so is Facebook. There is a case that could be made for them to become the new apps — and this certainly is how these two firms are pitching the concept. Chances are that Google will follow sooner than later, and I think that if the general idea of bots we have been so far given remains valid, the owning of a platform as popular as Android may leave the Mountain View behemoth with quite an interesting card up its sleeve, which could give them a notable lead in the upcoming war for bots dominance, were they to play it cleverly…
As part of announcements at Microsoft’s Build 2016 conference today, Skype announced a new ‘Bots’ platform that it’s launching today in preview mode for developers and users in the Android app (as well as the iPhone, iPad and Windows apps).