Hey World and welcome to the breakingbot.news blog!
As part of our one year long study project we will annotate the discussion about conversational bots with our own theoretical research and report on the progress of our take on a journalistic news bot. We, that’s Christine, Luca, Alex, Max, and Bernd, are graduate students in the media studies department at University Paderborn (Germany).
Mission statement
It is our goal to build our own news bot and take part in the ongoing discussion on (conversational) bots through our own theoretical research.
We think that media science and its theories can help understand the opportunities and challenges of conversational bots. Conversational bots seem to be a paradigm shift. They promise to leave a traditional user interface behind. Dan Grover is rightly sceptical to this view. Some interaction are much more complicated in a conversation, than in a simple, good designed web UI. But we believe that there are some interactions, which are less complicated, or are improved in other ways, by a conversational bot. And maybe a chat user experience isn’t so new after all. Isn’t a command line a bot in a way? And what about text adventures? IRC bots? We think a look at “old” technologies might shape the view on today’s bots.
There are also some (media science) theories which are interesting in context of conversational bots. Do conversational bots strengthen the filter bubble or do they fight it? What about parasocial interaction? There is a lot of ground to cover from a theory standpoint.
By building our own bot we want to gather experience in building and operating a bot. We choose to build a journalistic bot because it offers interesting challenges. Learning about the interests of the users, choosing the right sources, delivering fast enough as well as building a different kind of interface. Newspaper and their online counterparts are communicating their content in a user interface, which has hardly changed since the dawn of newspaper. Yes, there where improvements to the UI and UX but is still mostly a fixed 2D area. A conversational news bot could change this. Don’t get us wrong: A good user experience is still key, but by enhancing the messenger we start to walk away from a plain 2D area UX.
We are certainly not the first to build a journalistic bot nor the only ones trying at the moment. Since Facebook’s Messenger Platform was introduced some journalistic bots were launched. CNN has one as well as TechCrunch. Although, both Bots aren’t sophisticated. Their main feature are indistinguishable from a simple newsletter. We want to do better.
Talk to us!
Over the course of the next year we will publish our thoughts, experiences and findings in this blog. We would love to hear your feedback on our texts. You can comment or write us an email at hello@breakingbot.news.
