“K I Get Uber”
Your future of chat is arriving now
One of the “holy shit” moments. And one that anyone reading this in various parts of Asia will probably make fun of. A couple nights ago, I ordered an Uber through Facebook Messenger, and it was magical.
I realize this is nothing truly new. Again, you’ve been able to communicate and transact with various services through chat apps in many Asian countries for years now and it’s a really big thing. But it’s not yet a big thing in the U.S. and despite the efforts of Facebook and others, the rise of the bots is off to a (predictably) slow start over here.
And yet.
On Friday, I was chatting on Facebook Messenger with my wife about where we should grab dinner. Once we decided, I responded with a simple, informal “K I get uber.” Meaning, of course, that I would call an Uber and meet her there. What’s amazing in this mundanity is that Messenger was able to parse my words and figure out that I indeed wanted to order an Uber car, and so it automatically inserted a “Request a Ride” button right below my chat bubble.
I clicked the bubble, went through an Uber ordering flow — all within Messenger — that in some ways was better than the flow within the Uber app itself, and the car was on its way. I got a message from Uber’s Facebook Messenger bot, letting me know the car was on its way and an embedded map to track it. But I didn’t even need to do that because when it got to me, Uber messaged me, again via Messenger, to let me know the car was there, complete with driver name, car type, and license plate number. When the ride was over, Uber messaged me, yet again through Messenger, with a detailed receipt for the ride.
Who needs apps?
But really, this is a great experience. Again, in some ways better than using the standard Uber app itself. And the fact that it was all triggered contextually was simply amazing. Perhaps my tweet on the topic was a bit hyperbolic, but this does feel like the future of how chat apps will work here, in the U.S., as well.
Next step: parsing out the name of the restaurant where we intended to meet and auto-populating that in the “destination” field if/when I click on the “Request a Ride” button.
Of course, some people will read the above as extremely creepy. A conversation with my wife turned into a transaction for Facebook and Uber. But it strikes me as one of those things that is inevitable because of convenience and because social norms will change over time. Right now we’re chatting in apps, but have to go to other apps to fulfill the actions being talked about. That not only doesn’t make sense, it’s quite laborious.
It can be so much more convenient. And it will be.
