In theory, chatbots should be able to work with one another. To do that, they would need to share an API. The catch is there are probably thousands of commercial and open source APIs because there are at least that many developers. Developers typically stick to their preferred APIs. Companies usually turn to professional services to create a chatbot, although they can also build one of their own through an open source offering. The key to integration is choosing a common API, but there is no universal API standard. With thousands of APIs, many chatbots are solitary figures.

"It is a Wild West right now," said John Sprunger, senior technical architect at consulting firm West Monroe Partners. "There's no standard for integration across bots. The crux of it is passing a context between bots, and that's not happening."

In practice, Sprunger said, this means users can't ask a single chatbot to pull information from several different chatbots to do something like check an account balance, make dinner reservations and get a delivery status update.

Siri, a popular chatbot, can open a banking app on an iPhone, but it won't work in coordination with that bank's chatbot. "Apple forces you to narrow use cases," Sprunger said. "They handle the bot part, and you can't control what Siri says or does. It's a walled garden."

Alexa and Google Assistant, however, offer a more open API and are enabling companies to style their own chatbot skills -- essentially the functions of an app -- on those two chatbot platforms, Sprunger said. Capital One, for example, lets customers manage their accounts through Alexa. Meanwhile, Capital One's own chatbot, Eno, works on its own. That distinction might not bother customers who exclusively use Alexa or Eno. But, on a larger scale, a long list of chatbots aren't on the same page, and that will eventually bug consumers who want integrated services.

The good news is that companies are integrating their chatbots with web applications and devices in products such as smart home systems. "That has been standardized," Sprunger said. A chatbot can communicate with an automated smart home system, enabling a homeowner to shut off the lights, turn down the heat and turn on a television all from one device. "That area is fairly fleshed out," Sprunger added. "The device makers want to work with the chatbot makers and make everything easy."

While many companies want to embed their branded chatbots inside popular platforms like Alexa, they're not yet asking for a single set of chatbot standards that would enable them to connect their bot to other branded chatbots, according to Forrester's Jacobs. In other words, banks aren't yet looking to connect their chatbots with a chatbot from a department store -- but they undoubtedly will.

There are many nuances to chatbot integration, which is why the industry will eventually move toward a universal standard in which only one set of knowledge applies and chatbots can work in harmony, Jacobs said. "Brands will want their own chatbots in multiple places, but they won't want to redevelop it for each place," he said.

A need for efficiency will become a major factor in enterprises' chatbot plans. Businesses will want to corral their own chatbots, Jacobs said. Big brands, he said, already have several different chatbots, including one for marketing, a separate one for B2B accounts payable and another for B2C outreach.

"How do you centralize that so there is a consistent user interface even if one chatbot is built by Amazon and another by Microsoft and another by another third party?" he said.

Jacobs anticipates companies will either instruct all of their developers to follow a single set of in-house chatbot standards -- no more freelancing -- or they'll instead outsource to a third-party developer that adheres to a set standard.

"As consumers jump from experience to experience with one company, they'll want consistency in the chatbots," he said.

Some chatbot developers already recognize that need and are now developing a master, or concierge, chatbot that "sits in front and talks to the bots behind it," said Magnus Revang, vice president at Gartner. A few middleware platforms will also manage multiple bots, he said.

"You can orchestrate the whole bunch by setting up the skills differently in the master chatbot so you don't need to train them all," Revang said. "A chatbot talking to a chatbot will be necessary because you don't want 500 different chatbots for different tasks. There will be room for only one master bot in an enterprise. The master bot is the only one that learns. The big software companies, they need to own that master bot in the enterprise, or they will lose the enterprise."

Steve Worswick, senior AI designer for chatbot developer Pandorabots, thinks he knows why companies haven't been quick to integrate chatbots. It's not because of technical reasons.

"Lots of rival companies don't want to share things," he said. Worswick developed Mitsuku, which won the Loebner Prize, a competition for the most humanlike bot, four times.

He said he can see why companies might take a proprietary approach. If they create a chatbot that's substantially better than existing alternatives, the competition may fall away.

Worswick wants more than simple integration. He would like to see a global network of chatbots. "Chatbots can still do their own thing, but they can also tap into a network, where maybe bots from Italy can pop up and tell you about something going on there. I'm not sure how an internet of bots will be received by the public. It's hard to try to tend to a middle ground."

source : https://searchcio.techtarget.com/feature/How-to-deal-with-the-lack-of-chatbot-standards