Google is heavily invested into A.I. technology and you can see this in many forms, from the A.I. engine that powers the Google app to Google’s DeepMind A.I. that challenged world champion Go player, Lee Sedol. Google is also said to be announcing their Google Home product tomorrow which is likely to be powered by their A.I. engine, and it seems now that they’re finally going to start preparing for their entry into using messaging bots. If you’re a user of Telegram, you’ll already be familiar with what messaging bots are capable of. You can essentially type up a mention of a specific bot in any chat like “@music” for example, and Telegram’s music bot will let you search for and link a particular song in the chat. That is just the tip of the iceberg, though, as bots could be used for more advanced things like hailing an uber ride.
With Telegram already well into their messaging bot development and other companies like Facebook having announced and started development on their own bot offering, it’s a wonder why Google waited this long. According to new details from The Information, Google is all set to dive right into chat bots and plans to unveil new details about its bot efforts at Google I/O this week.
Rumors have been swirling for months that Google would be launching a messaging app or service that was more centered around the use of bots, but nothing has since been announced nor launched to any platform. As the keynote takes place tomorrow morning at 10AM PST, Google could end up squeezing just a little bit about bots somewhere in between all of the other details during the two-hour long speech. With no exact specifics just yet, the latest details about Google’s bot focus seems to be that they will introduce a set of tools that allows developers to build chat bots into existing services and messaging platforms instead of offering their own messaging service with chat bots integrated into it. This sort of approach is already being referred to as a smarter decision for Google, as their messaging services, while popular, are not near the amount of popularity in scale as Facebook’s Messenger. Tools, though, would let them finally enter into the chat bot space without having to actually build a whole new app. Google already offers two messaging services with Hangouts for chat, and Messenger for SMS messages, so a third would simply make things more congested, although Google could simply roll chat bots into one of their existing apps.