Not every brand needs a bot and some need bots more than others. CNN has a great brand and no technology or product launch should be lacking in brand support – the Facebook chatbot announcement is no exception! The true value of Facebook's launch is that by “forcing” (or encouraging) brands to build bots – they are giving us a glimpse at what these creatures can look like – this especially true with the CNN bot.
Essentially the CNN Bot is a good example of no-frills, News Bot 101 that takes a “Subscribe First” approach to deliverying news content to users. For those unfamiliar with our terminology, by “Subscribe First” we mean that the application assumes that the first thing a user wants to do is to subscribe to content or news updates.
NOTE: This post is part of an ongoing series on chatbot applications. You can subscribe to updates if you want to follow the entire series.
Below is a transcript of a conversation with the bot:
Links:
Functionality:
- Allows users to subscribe to news topics (daily)
- Allows users to search for news topics
Positive:
- Keyword based news headline delivery is intiuitive, probably would have made sense to start with that
- Support for the HELP keyword
Negatives:
- Assumes every user wants to subscribe to news updates and its not immediately obvious how to unsubscribe
- Should start with a welcome message (see WSJ.com) of available options
- Doesn't user personalization (user's name for example)
- Minor: Functionality limited to only news, but then again…that's the only thing CNN does
Platform and Technology:
- Unknown at this time