How to deal with the lack of chatbot standards
It’s all in the API
Despite a lack of industry-accepted chatbot standards, bots tend to fall into a handful of categories.
There are the chatbots that communicate through audio, text or both. Personal assistant chatbots, such as Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, speak answers and display text and visuals, while also performing a wide array of tasks, like setting an alarm on a mobile device, relaying last night’s baseball scores or providing a list of pizza restaurants in your area.
Companies also deploy chatbots on websites and mobile apps to communicate with customers through the written word. Chatbots field basic queries and give quick answers so that customers don’t necessarily have to speak with a human representative.
In theory, chatbots should be able to work with one another. To do that, they would need to share an API. The catch is there are probably thousands of commercial and open source APIs because there are at least that many developers. Developers typically stick to their preferred APIs. Companies usually turn to professional services to create a chatbot, although they can also build one of their own through an open source offering. The key to integration is choosing a common API, but there is no universal API standard. With thousands of APIs, many chatbots are solitary figures.
“It is a Wild West right now,” said John Sprunger, senior technical architect at consulting firm West Monroe Partners. “There’s no standard for integration across bots. The crux of it is passing a context between bots, and that’s not happening.”
In practice, Sprunger said, this means users can’t ask a single chatbot to pull information from several different chatbots to do something like check an account balance, make dinner reservations and get a delivery status update.
Siri, a popular chatbot, can open a banking app on an iPhone, but it won’t work in coordination with that bank’s chatbot. “Apple forces you to narrow use cases,” Sprunger said. “They handle the bot part, and you can’t control what Siri says or does. It’s a walled garden.”
Alexa and Google Assistant, however, offer a more open API and are enabling companies to style their own chatbot skills — essentially the functions of an app — on those two chatbot platforms, Sprunger said. Capital One, for example, lets customers manage their accounts through Alexa. Meanwhile, Capital One’s own chatbot, Eno, works on its own. That distinction might not bother customers who exclusively use Alexa or Eno. But, on a larger scale, a long list of chatbots aren’t on the same page, and that will eventually bug consumers who want integrated services.
The good news is that companies are integrating their chatbots with web applications and devices in products such as smart home systems. “That has been standardized,” Sprunger said. A chatbot can communicate with an automated smart home system, enabling a homeowner to shut off the lights, turn down the heat and turn on a television all from one device. “That area is fairly fleshed out,” Sprunger added. “The device makers want to work with the chatbot makers and make everything easy.”