At a recent Webinar, I asked people who was working on chatbots. It’s slightly biased because the audience I asked had already subscribed to a Webinar about chatbots but ….

So let’s start by looking at a couple of chatbots to draw some conclusions — or at least questions you should be asking yourself before you build (more on those questions here)— on the product itself.  

Let’s take Bild as an example and break down their chat product. It’s a standalone chat, not embedded into other pages. At the very top in yellow, you see an alert: “You are now chatting with ‘Hey_,’ your AI helper. We are still in the testing phase. The answers are not from Bild. Please keep in mind that an AI can sometimes be wrong.”

They are very clear that this is not a finished product. It’s interesting to me that they are seemingly using the open Web for their responses. I’ll get back to this point later.

Below this alert near the top is a section with images and headers. These are popular questions that have already been asked. To note here: This is not only a chat — it’s content in its own right as a user can be voyeuristic, seeing what others have asked. This also brings the cost down as queries aren’t re-run. 

Next you’ll see that they give prompt ideas, which ChatGPT and other offers also do. Some kind of prompt seems to be essential to nudge people along the journey. A blank slate can be scary for people; prompts take them from zero to one. 

Bild’s chat is open for anyone to use.

Which users is this for?

• It could be gated for subscribers/members for engagement and retention. 

• It could be for logged-in users only as an incentive to get first-party data. 

• One option, as we were told at Skift during the recent INMA Media Subscriptoins Summit, is that it could be in front of the paywall as an incentive to sign up. Users get a short answer for free, but if they want to dig deeper, they need to sign up. 

• Or, of course, it can be free and open to more users. 

During our recent Webinar on chatbots, Lucky Gunasekara, CEO of Miso.AI, wrote in the chat: “One tactic we saw in the wild is using chatbot usage metering to drive anon visitors to register and then subscribe. We got early data from one site doing this and the conversion funnel was about 35% from Day 1.”

Where does it fit with the user journey?

• Most experiments seem to be standalone. We’ve seen it with Bild, Forbes, and Planet Money (the latter of which you can learn about in our recent members-only Webinar). This acts more like search.  

• Or on the article page (reportedly both Blick and Ippen are focusing on this). This could be helpful to users as they have a base (story) to go from. They are then likely to ask related questions such as going deeper on a specific point or asking for explanations.

Now, as we dig into the content itself, let’s look at how Forbes and Bild compare in how they respond:

Note how Forbes gives a summary and then goes to related articles. This is the same as we saw with Planet Money during their demo in the Webinar. Bild takes a different tack, answering everything in the chat and suggesting responses (none of which are further prompts). 

As a news organisation, I would assume that you want to point people towards your original journalism. We know this is true of Forbes and Planet Money, plus how Ringier is looking at this.

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