Future Chatbot

For Vodafone’s 20 years on the Romanians market, one of the biggest challenges was reaching out and engaging with youngsters (14-24 years old). One of the market known insights was that they are using less and less traditional media and they reject ads. Stalking them with banners was clearly not the way to go.

On the other hand, teens love to chat online.

Using these insights, our challenge was again: HOW CAN WE TAKE PART IN THEIR CONVERSATION? The answer: Future Chatbot – The first CONTENT CHATBOT.

Meet Future Chatbot, your bot friend. It entertains with stories. It shows you glimpses of how life was in the past. Before internet and digital everything. And how it will be in the future.

We chose to surprise teens with stories about life 20 years ago to link with anniversary but also because they cannot imagine a life without Internet or social media. And we follow-up with how life will be in the next 20 years, because teens are dreamers at heart.

The key was however the perceived personality. Future Chatbot was portrayed as: friendly, humorous, informal. It addressed questions, challenged the teens, and shared his own experience and opinions. Success depended on making teens treat it as a friend and making them forget they are talking to an algorithm.

We succeeded in making Future Chatbot appear as a friend. Teens asked for its advice on homework, love life, plans. They shared secrets and hopes. They even invited the bot out to eat or just hang out with them.

Scripted content used for this project was the equivalent of a 100-page novel. It grew to this dimension because teens engaged with it extensively. We kept adding content to keep the current users interested.

Beyond the script, we needed that the bot was perceived as a person even when teens outlined in their messages that the bot did not understand them. There was no A.I. capable of this at that point. So, we faked it. It had 20+ lines of responses for unknown input that were vague and cryptic enough to seem like responses to teens’ replies. Example ‘Do not ask me that, you don’t really want to know.’