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It's morning. You're rushing to get out the door to get to work on time. But you want to know whether to take an umbrella and how long the commute will be. Maybe you're low on vitamins and want to remember to reorder. So you do what anyone would naturally do under the circumstances-you have a conversation with a computer, in this case, Alexa, the voice-controlled bot integrated with Amazon's Echo Bluetooth speaker. What might this have to do with libraries? Potentially, quite a lot.
As web librarians, we spend a lot of time thinking and learning about-and of course creating-user interfaces (UIs). Indeed, our Control -Shift column devotes a lot of mind share to issues around tools, techniques, and best practices for creating online experiences that are as usable, useful, painless, and even delightful as they can be. Those of us who have been around a while remember the days before the graphical user interfaces (GUI) of today, back when the command line ruled. In the same way that the move from command line to GUI was a seismic shift in how humans interact with computers, a similarly significant shift is taking place now with the rise of the conversational interface, powered by chatbots.
WHAT IS A CHATBOT?
You may be wondering what a chatbot is. Very simply, a chatbot is a computer program designed to provide some sort of information or service where the user interfaces with it conversationally via text or audio. Alexa can use a verbal communication interface, as when you ask whether to take the umbrella, but it's just as common to interface with a chatbot via a text-messaging type of interface.
Bots can be rules-based or use artificial intelligence (AI). Rules-based bots are more limited in that they don't learn from interactions to get smarter over time, whereas bots that are based on AI can learn. Watson, the IBM bot that famously won Jeopardy!, is the most widely know of these smart bots. In either of these cases, the environment can be human hybrid. If the bot gets a question it can't answer, it can be programmed to turn the transaction over to a human.
WHY BOTS MAY BE BETTER
Bots are better at some things. Let's say you're...