Trends on Tuesday: Robot Messaging Goes Mainstream
John Connor can’t save you. Robots are here to take over the world.
![A beautiful female cyborg with the face, still connected to the head by cables, held in one of her hands.](https://s3.amazonaws.com/digitalgov/_legacy-img/2016/02/600-x-400-Adult-pretty-cyborg-robot-woman-stylish-portrait-Skin-texture-saved-tolokonov-iStock-Thinkstock-492534457.jpg)
Two interesting new consumer mobile and digital content experiences were launched in the past week, signaling some of the first mainstream brands embracing this new paradigm of interactive, bot-driven content experiences: Quartz’s News App and The New York Times Election Slack Bot.
Both leverage different scripted technology but signal that large consumer-facing brands are using messaging technology as an experience and interface for interacting and sending and receiving information smartly. Messaging as an app-like experience is one of the trends I pointed out coming in 2016, and it came fast.
![Smartphone in a hand with sms text message icons](https://s3.amazonaws.com/digitalgov/_legacy-img/2016/02/600-x-400-Smartphone-in-a-hand-with-interesting-graphic-Gearstd-iStock-Thinkstock-465494036.jpg)
“The Gray Lady’s” Election Slack Bot acts as an interactive interface to the newsroom and collects and sends questions to the newsroom through Slack, the chat/communication tool.
Quartz’s app is a mobile application in the traditional sense that you download it from iTunes and install it, but the content experience is much closer to SMS messaging than a flat news website. There’s a clear a give-and-take of information with the user, providing nuggets and teases of articles—even haikus of the daily stock market action—then the user can ask questions for more information.
![Screen capture of 2 screens from the Quartz iPhone News App](https://s3.amazonaws.com/digitalgov/_legacy-img/2016/02/600-x-513-Screen-capture-of-2-screens-from-the-Quartz-iPhone-News-App.jpg)
Both of these offer very interesting views of the future of digital content and how publishers and audiences will interact with it. It’s a world closer to the movie Her, in which an FAQ might respond to your questions personally, rather than just being a flat text document.
How can your government agency prepare for more interactive, give-and-take user experiences beyond published Web pages and apps?
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords and content experiences.