The use of Chatbots (CB) and Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPA) is exploding.
There are now over 300,000 CBs on Messenger – up from 100,000 a year ago – and the IPA market is growing at 36.7% and is expected to reach $12.3B by 2024.
As the market expands so does the intensity of the discussion about the defining characteristics of each type of system.
There are a number of credible sources that claim that there are no material differences or that one is a subset of the other. While it’s true that the lines are blurring and new subclasses are emerging, it isn’t accurate to say that they are the same thing. There are key differences and it’s important to understand the distinctions.
This post discusses seven key differences and explains why they matter. Of course it’s possible to find CBs that act a lot like IPAs and IPAs that smell like CBs, but the descriptions in this post relate to the typical use of CBs and IPAs.
The remainder of this post looks at the differences as they exist today and focuses on differences that are likely to continue into the future regardless of changes in technology.
Seven Key Differences
Many of the articles that discuss differences focus on distinctions in terms of technology and capabilities, however, this often obscures the most important and clear distinctions:
1. Intent
The discussions that focus on technical differences often miss the single most clear distinction between CBs and IPAs: they play for different teams.
In general CBs are intended to serve companies and similar organizations. The may well “serve the user” in the sense that they give the user important information or provide some service, but their purpose is to serve the company. Any assistance they provide to the user is a byproduct of their efforts to achieve corporate objectives.
The roles are reversed for IPAs. They exist to serve the user.
An IPA may well do something that benefits a company – for example, booking a table at a restaurant – but any service they provide to a company is a byproduct of their efforts to serve the user. Note that IPAs such as Alexa may well have an overall objective of selling products but those sales occur indirectly as the system goes about serving the needs of the user.
2. Location of Execution
The second characteristic is related to the first. The classes differ in terms of where they operate.
Most CBs are corporate based and as a result CB’s tend to execute in office environments. IPAs are consumer based and as a result most IPAs operate in a home or on a personal device.
3. Scope and Domain
CBs by their nature tend to deal with specific types of problems within limited domains. For example, a customer support CB will generally deal only with customer support problems and only with problems that relate to the subject company’s products and services.
IPAs operate within an environment that is much broader and more open-ended. Alexa currently has 15,000 specific skills and they vary from helping users plan a vacation to finding out facts about the Indian city of Dehradun.
Some very credible sources claim that this distinction is a myth, pointing out that CBs are growing more capable every day. This assertion fails to recognize how CBs and IPAs are typically used today. Certainly CBs could be extended to serve in broader areas but the typical CB in the current world deals in a much more restricted domain.
4. User Knowledge
The effectiveness of IPAs depends on having access to specific knowledge regarding the user. CBs may also have some user knowledge but it tends to be much less extensive compared to the knowledge maintained by IPAs. For example, a typical CB may well know which of the company’s products the user owns whereas an IPA may have access to the user’s full contact list, their gmail history, and many other bits of information
5. Persistence
IPAs tend to have a persistent relationship with their users. CBs model service representatives who are picking up whatever call comes in whereas IPAs are in a long-term relationship with the user they serve
6. Interface
Most CBs operate using message systems. Many people think of CBs as running on services such as Facebook Messenger and Slack but the fact is that Line, Skype, WeChat, Spark, Telegram, and Viber also provide APIs for building CBs.
IPAs tend to have much richer interfaces using voice, text, images, and video to communicate with their users.
7. Development Process
The last point of contrast relates to the process for developing each type of system.
It’s possible to go from 100,000 to 300,000 CBs in one year because it is a relatively straightforward process to develop a simple CB. Development platforms such as Dialogflow allow developers to build a basic chatbot in a matter of hours. A number of companies provide tools that they claim will allow users to develop CBs without even using code. There are also a number of platforms for building CBs and many great companies that build CBs on behalf of customers.
Building an IPA is much more complicated and takes much more time. The major players have invested hundreds of employees and many years in the development of their IPAs.
It is certain that CBs and IPAs will continue to evolve and accelerate into the future. It will be interesting to see what develops and to see how the terminology changes as the systems evolve.
