This week, Google announced the Google Assistant, which isn’t yet available, but will be later this year. It’s part of Allo, which is Google’s new messaging app that was also announced this week at Google I/O – the company’s developer conference. With the Google Assistant, you can have it make a reservation for you at your favorite restaurant. You can also have it give you the score from last night’s game in case you missed it, and so much more. Bots have become the “Next Big Thing” in Silicon Valley. Microsoft announced bots for Skype at their own developer conference earlier this year. However it now looks like Microsoft is working on another product, named the Bing Concierge Bot.
The purpose of the Bing Concierge Bot would be to help users get stuff done. It would work over platforms like Skype, Messenger, SMS, WhatsApp and Telegram. All of this information was unveiled in a job listing that the company has since removed. About their new product, the listing stated “the agent does what a human assistant would do: it runs errands on behalf of the user, by automatically completing tasks for the user. The users talk to the agent in natural language, and the agent responds in natural language to collect all the information.” It definitely sounds like a competitor to the Google Assistant and even Viv, which the makers of Siri debuted a few weeks ago.
Now there is already a lot of work done for Microsoft, when it comes to building a productivity assistant. As we have mentioned already, the company did unveil its Bot Framework at their developer conference in March, which will work with Skype and Outlook. So it wouldn’t be too surprising to see this functionality built into another product that can work on multiple platforms, as what the Bing Concierge Bot is slated to be doing.
Facebook has also dabbled into the bots arena lately. At their own developer conference ‘f8’, they announced bots for Facebook Messenger. Many companies already have bots ready for Messenger, including KLM. Which allows you to message the bot and get things like your boarding pass, the time of your flight, if there are any other delays and even checking into your flight. We’ll likely see the exact same thing for the Bing Concierge Bot, when it debuts.