The O’Reilly Bots Podcast: The 2017 bot outlook with one of the field’s early adopters.

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Chris Messina, bot evangelist, creator of the hashtag, and, until recently, developer experience lead at Uber. We talk about the origins of MessinaBot, ruminate on the need for bots that truly exploit their medium rather than imitating older apps, and take a look at what’s ahead for bots in 2017.

Discussion points:

• Traditional résumés provide the same comprehensive overview regardless of who’s reading; MessinaBot customizes the experience of learning about its creator, and draws together content that’s ordinarily spread across many channels.
• “Conversational commerce,” the messaging trend that Messina named in 2015
• Messina’s work with Esther Crawford, who launched her résumé bot EstherBot in 2016

• The state of bot skeuomorphism
• Product Hunt’s role in the popular emergence of bots
• For small businesses, setting up a bot interface could be easier than creating a traditional website. Until recently, Path’s Talk app even had a call center to route messages to businesses that didn’t have messaging capabilities.