What Happened
Foursquare is jumping on the chatbot bandwagon with a new app called Marsbot, which learns about a user’s preferences for restaurants and bars from their Foursquare location data and recommends new places that fit their tastes via a text interface. Unlike most existing chatbots, however, Marsbot does not need users to initiate the conversation. Instead, it is designed to send out contextually relevant recommendations to users unprompted and gather feedback to enhance its future suggestions. Foursquare released Marsbot on the App Store on Tuesday, and says the app is still in an “early testing stage” so users are instructed to sign up for a wait list.
Why Brands Should Care
This new app from Foursquare provides an interesting example of a use case for chatbots as it reframes push notifications in a conversational interface. Unlike other local search and recommendation apps, the Marsbot app aims to capture user attention and engagement with relevant messages delivered via a text interface that most smartphone users are fond of. For brands vying for consumer attention on the increasingly crowded mobile space, it is important to create a touchpoint in environments that consumers are already familiar with.
For more information on how brands can effectively reach consumers on messaging apps and other conversational platforms, check out the Conversational Interfaces section in our Outlook 2016.
Source: Tech Insider
