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The Local Chatbot Disruption

The Upcoming Collision between Messaging and Local

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The Local Chatbot Disruption:The Upcoming Collision between Messaging and Local

• What is a chatbot

• The importance of conversational commerce in local

• The upcoming tectonic shift - why the local industry needs to care about messaging

• Are chatbots the killer use case for local?

• AI meets appointment booking

• Resources

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2016 has been deemed “the year of conversational commerce” by industry pundits.

The $300 billion local industry is already providing rich digital and mobile experiences for customers. Now, broader consumer adoption of messaging platforms like WeChat, Slack, Kik, Telegram and FacebookM are creating demand and opportunity for innovation in the realm of messaging.

Enter the chatbot, the enabler of conversational commerce, which is poised to massively evolve digital task completion on messaging platforms.

The following pages outline the forces at work with this disruption and what it could mean for the local industry.

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What is a chatbot?

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A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users. Chatbots respond to natural language text or voice and respond conversationally.

They can understand commands in order to complete tasks or simply engage in small talk, with the aim of appearing human. Artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of natural language processing is usually integrated into a chatbot’s specialized software or programming language.

Chatbots are also called intelligent virtual assistants, voice assistants, invisible or conversational commerce and chatterbots.

• “A chatbot is an artificial person, animal or other creature which holds conversations with humans. “ - chatbots.org

• “Chat bots are small programs that integrate with a chat platform and provide some advanced type of functionality in a fairly easy fashion.” – TechCrunch

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“…For the first time ever, bots will let you instantly interact with the world around you…

There’s no new app to download, no new account to create, and , perhaps more importantly, no new interface to learn. You just scan and chat. They can reduce friction to as

close to zero as computing allows.”

– Ted Livingston, Founder and CEO of Kik

Why the fuss?

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Chatbots will reduce friction between users and businesses to allow things that the PC, web and mobile have not yet supported.

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Chatbots you may already know

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Siri Slackbot Facebook M

Telegram Bot Platform Kik Messenger WeChat

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Conversational Commerce in Local

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Conversational commerce is important and exciting because it captures a new dimension for businesses to communicate, engage and assist consumers through their purchase journey.

These chatbots are efficient, friendly, task completion mechanisms that can provide a direct interface between a customer and a business and shorten the distance between search and a transaction.

Chatbots have the opportunity to transform the local commerce experience.

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“Conversational commerce is about delivering convenience, personalization, and

decision support while people are on the go, with only partial attention to spare.

…you and I will be talking to brands and companies over Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and

elsewhere before year’s end, and will find it normal”

– Chris Messina, Lead Developer, Uber

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Chat is the new “Universal UI”

• Chatbots can reside in almost any digital setting that can support a conversational experience, but the biggest playground for development and execution is within messaging platforms.

• WeChat is a supreme example of chat becoming the primary interface within messaging, inspiring the phrase “chat as a universal UI”

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CHATBOTS IMPACT ON LOCAL WILL MANIFEST ON MESSAGING PLATFORMS.

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In a blog post on Chinese app trends, designer and engineer Dan Grover announced the emergence of “chat as a universal UI.”

Grover had moved from San Francisco to Guangzhou to work as a product manager for popular messaging app WeChat and noted the advent of “official accounts” for brands and public figures on the service. “Think SmarterChild but for banks, phone companies, blogs, hospitals, malls, and government agencies,” he explained, likening the accounts to the friendly AIM bot of yore.

Today’s WeChat users ask their bank about their balance much like you and I once pestered SmarterChild for movie times. – Wired

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Why should the local industry care about messaging?

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• Messaging now dominates all digital activity. Messaging apps have surpassed social networks in monthly active users around the world.

• Messaging is a global trend that will define local’s future…

Image source: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-messaging-app-report-2015-11?IR=T

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Messaging = Mobile = Local

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Buying products and services, booking, reserving, commenting, etc. are all normal forms of action that we all take on a daily basis on the web and now increasingly on mobile. There is also a high correlation of mobile actions being local actions.

When Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker released her annual Internet trends report, one of her biggest findings was the rapid growth of mobile messaging applications, which currently occupy six of the top ten slots for the most-used apps.

If messaging now dominates mobile, then the local industry should prepare for a new mobile messaging paradigm.

SELECTED GLOBAL MESSAGING LEADERS

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The Tectonic Shift Toward Messaging

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Messaging has arrived globally, and soon it will arrive locally.

However it is important to stress that this is human-to-human traffic, not human-to-machine and there is a big difference when we think about the potential for tectonic shift that might come from messaging.

The big question is:

Whereas the browser is the dominant window to the web, is the messaging APP

this same window on mobile?

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Messaging: The War to Win on Mobile?

It makes sense that the world of information and action should reside within the wrapper that we are spending most of our time on mobile - the messaging app.

• Perhaps the browser and all its current functionality is less relevant in this scenario and messaging is the war to win, particularly on mobile.

• And if chat is the “universal UI” of messaging, perhaps conversational bots will be the winning army.

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“…one thing I think we can all agree on is that chat is going to be the world’s next

operating system: a BotOS…

Chat apps will come to be thought of asthe new browsers; bots will be the new websites.

This is the beginning of a new internet.”

– Ted Livingston, Founder and CEO of Kik

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Can Chatbots Drive Messaging UX?

There are several big questions to consider in a future where the messaging app and chatbots substantially replaces the browser.

• Does the information and action objective belong within the messaging wrapper context?

• What information needs to be part of this messaging journey?

• How will the discovery phase differ than discrete task completion?

• When do users want to see reviews, pics, maps, menus etc.?

• With the complex issue of the user experience of messaging being command line interface (CLI) driven, how can various actions best fit within this UX paradigm?

Many industry thought leaders, including Pingup, are addressing these issues. The general sense is that tech creators will need to pay close attention to the user's content consumption journey to any action and work through how partners can exist in concert.

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Where Messaging and Local Collide

What does all of this mean for the local industry? What will a future built on

messaging platforms with tasks completed by chatbots mean for local commerce?

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Two Possibilities to Consider

• Google could face a direct threat from bots/messaging. Caveat - its early – but the CLI that is Google today could essentially be replaced by the CLI within the messaging wrappers that access bots and API's rather than exclusively Google's search engine. This has massive implications to Google's (and others) search business:

• Adwords goes away as we know it today, and…

• page-rank becomes obsolete

• Chatbots could enable consumers to talk directly to the business, upending current publisher relationships. Traditionally, publishers have tried to drive consumers to the merchant profile page where engagement happens and information is obtained (i.e.., reviews, click to call, etc.) Chatbots could ultimately usurp this by enabling direct engagement and transactions between consumer and business.

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Is There a Killer Use Case in Local?

Through the chaos of disruption will arise innovative solutions and new use cases. Pingup believes:

The killer use case in local is where all LOCAL actions can be captured and completed by chatbots over messaging platforms

• The potential exists to operate these functions solely on artificial intelligence and several APIs, with an almost complete independence from human operation on the service end.

• Pingup’s APIs and patents are positioned to power these actions.

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DOMINANT CONSUMER ACTIONS

Book an Appointment

Reserve a Table

Order Food

Request Service

Book a Hotel

Book a Flight

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Artificial Intelligence MeetsLocal Services AppointmentsPingup Appointments Anywhere™ The API for AI

• Pingup Appointments Anywhere™ API is uniquely positioned to be the only method for a bot or other AI to facilitate a fully-programmatic (no human needed) local services appointment scheduling transaction in real-time.

• Pingup’s API technology is already powering appointment booking features on leading consumer publishers such as YP, CitySearch, Superpages and others to be announced.

• Pingup is bringing its API-powered live booking capability to a broader range of leading-edge consumer interfaces and platforms. Pingup-powered bots can allow consumers to book and confirm appointments in real-time with tens of thousands of Local Businesses across the US.

• Pingup is the only aggregated API of live-bookable inventory that has the capability of powering appointment scheduling across new AI, messaging and bot platforms – TODAY.

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pingup.ai

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Pingup has Conversational Commerce Covered

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Pingup holds the following technology patents on managing user chat experiences with businesses:U.S. Patent: #8,965,976 awarded on Feb 24, 2015: and U.S. Patent: #8,972,502 awarded on Mar 3, 2015

Want details or a demo? Let’s chat (pun intended)

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About Pingup

Pingup is the world’s largest aggregation platform for local services bookings, using proprietary technology to connect tens of thousands of local merchants with leading publishers such as YP, Citysearch and Superpages, with over 100 million monthly users and 250 million monthly local searches.

Pingup aggregates 55,000 US businesses, more than double OpenTable’s quantity in the US and continues to add thousands of businesses each month. The company is headquartered in Boston’s Innovation District and backed by Avalon Ventures.

For more information on Pingup, visit us at http://pingup.com

Follow us on Twitter: @pingupapp

Contact information:Heather Searsheather@pingup.com(617) 752-1691

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Resources

• Chatbots.org: Chatbots.org

• Forbes: The Next Big Thing in Retail is Programmatic Commerce

• Medium: Why Conversational Commerce may be our Best Chant to Re-Imagine the Web

• Medium: Conversational Commerce: Messaging Apps Bring Point of Sale to You

• Medium: 2016 Will Be the Year of Conversational Commerce

• Medium: Maintained List of Chatbot Links

• Medium: The Messaging Landscape in 2016

• Motherboard: How to Think About Bots

• Techcrunch: On Chatbots

• TechCrunch: Chat Apps Increasingly Important for Brands

• Techcrunch: Facebook Messenger Ads

• TechInsider: Bots Pay Parking Tickets

• TheNextWeb: Slackbot May Soon Be a Log more Helpful than Siri

• Venture Beat: Why Bots, Not AI, are the Future of Chat

• Wikipedia: The Turning Test

• Wired: Future UI Design

• Pingup website: http://pingup.com/ai/

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