Recently I wrote a post summarizing my perspective on Google Wave. Shortly thereafter, I was contacted by a reader and asked why I had not mentioned Wave Robots. I errored in not including them previously, and this post contains my perspective.
One of the reasons I had not included robots previously is because I did not feel I understood them well enough. I make it a general practice to not speak about subjects I don’t feel I understand properly.
On to Google Wave Robots.
It helps to think about Wave robots as plugins that interact with other sets of information and return requested information to the Wave. It took me a while to understand that this is what they are. Looking back, the term robot fits perfectly. For some reason I had a hard time understanding what a Wave robot really entailed, and the numorous low-quality, little-purpose Wave robots only served to further compound my confusion.
Now that we understand what Wave robots are, how does this impact us? Are they beneficial, and if so, in what areas?
I personally see a fair bit of use for the enterprise. The ability to call up corporate information via an authorized robot helps balance security and ease of use (not everyone in the meeting may have appropriate permissions to access the requested information). It also adds an efficiency perk to the production of corporate documents.
I don’t see much use for Wave robots outside the enterprise at this point. This is not to question the validity of the service itself, but merely that I believe that using Wave robots will not appeal to the majority of the personal market. People don’t want to sit down and open up a new wave to request information. The psychology of the Wave robots is that they are participants in a conversation. Mentally, initiating a conversation with a robot solely to obtain information breaks the personal aspect. The Wave robot becomes a tool, rather than a participant. Having a conversation with a tool is different than having a conversation with a person.
You also have to take into account that, beyond the psychological aspect, when people are looking for information, it tends to be while mobile. Things like GOOG411 or Google Voice Search are much closer to a conversational interaction than Google Wave in its current stage. I think that Wave as a limited target in the personal market segment.
Again, a similar conclusion to my prior post. If you’re a business, there is lots of potential with Wave robots. If you’re a home user, there is limited use.
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You are right that many of the compelling uses for robots are tied to business use – but there are in fact various uses of robots for casual use, like shopping or games. The withwaves.com crew has a few nice consumer-oriented robots that tie in with Amazon & E-bay: http://withwaves.com/
Once we release some improvements to the robots API, you should start seeing more user-friendly robots that help out in a variety of situations. Stay tuned!
Thank you Pamela. I agree that there are a variety of potential cases in which Wave robots may help out. However, until there are mobile applications which plugin to the API in a different manner, I don’t believe that Wave robots will take off in the personal sector. I personally believe that for data retrieval purposes, a conversation robot will be less effective than an application designed to retrieve and present that data.
Any hints as to potential API changes that will target this point?