👍 Congratulations for your chatbot Mr President !

Yesterday,
the White House released a brand new chatbot. 🙂

Why?

One remarkable habit of @Potus has been reading 10 letters a day since he was elected.
This allows him to get the pace of the nation from the inside.
I did my math and if that comes to be true it’s a quite impressive number of letters:

As of today, Obama has been President for 7 years and 204 days.
(7*365 + 204) * 10 = 27,590… That’s a lot of letters!

But wait, who is writing letters anymore?
Are those letters representative of generation X, Y, Z?
They are probably more used to emails, SMS or Facebook Messenger.

So, according to the White House, 2016 is Messenger year!
With 60B daily messages and 900M users worldwide, it’s probably a safe bet.

How?

Now, let’s see how the bot experience is delivered.

The experience is focused on getting your message to Obama, getting your name and email address… and that’s it until Mr. President decides to answer you. 🙂

The purpose is simple, and the edge cases are well managed.
At the end, you get an emoji and a cool video.

Still we may regret that the bot isn’t showing any kind of intelligence.
In fact, you may have sent your message to the President 10 times faster using the contact form…

It may have been funnier if the bot had been an automated version of Obama! Some gamification around his job, or even some interactive poll on his next actions, travels, outfits…

You can try this bot by yourself here.
The operation is also described on the White House website, here.

We hope to see more bots used by political figures but they should be aware that a poorly designed bot will inevitably flop.

And if President Hollande needs a bot,
we’ll be happy to build one for him. 😉