Let’s start with the laziness aspect. If I flash two pictures in front of your eyes in a split second, you will recognize one picture instantly, and you will have no clue of the other. Guess which one is which?

For evolutionary reasons, the human brain’s cognitive capacity is largely reserved for image recognition to detect dangers instantly. Obviously, a tiger would not send you a text message before attacking; therefore, “reading” is not a biological priority. Since humans started to read only for a few thousand years, we are not yet evolved to balance the picture above. As a result, “reading” is a painful and tiresome activity. We all know this from school days. Hence the saying “a picture is worth thousand words.”

Now the same comparison can be made with these two images. The image replaced by tiger is still not as easily recognizable, however, it is much easy on the eye. And the most importantly, it promotes focus that is one screen, one place, one single action for interaction. The reason for messaging platforms to be so widespread and popular is this basic principle of FOCUS that plays into the hands of a lazy brain. Probably, half of the messaging activity includes pictures and videos, satisfying the hunger of a lazy brain through this focused interaction.

The second principle is that the human brain is a STIMULUS junkie. In a boring environment, a human brain will always steer toward something more exciting. Curiosity and learning have strong ties to the evolutionary instincts of survival. It is “in our nature.” Stimuli can now be delivered instantly by mobile devices. Chatting/texting with a friend on a mobile phone while socializing with others has recently become a widely acceptable form of social interaction. Everybody silently agrees that we all need to be stimulated even during the short, dull moments of our social gathering. It may actually improve our social relationships since we no longer have to endure boredom when we get together.

If people have already chosen chat/text as one of the most precious priorities in their lives, then why not use the same tool (Chatbots) to interact with computers, databases, websites, machines, and even with books?

That is the point of departure of this new wave of realization across the tech world. The only problem, though, is that chatbots are not as easy to develop as many people assume so. It requires the culmination and curation of machine learning, natural language processing, and the psychology of human dialogue. These are not easy skills to deploy, and the market will eventually filter out its natural selection of the fittest. Chatbots are here to stay and occupy our lives in the next decades to come.