The Metaverse Handbook. QuHarrison Terry

platforms like Slack, Teams, Workplace, and Discord, the next wave of bots began taking shape. Workplace bots are now used to track co-worker progress, seamlessly schedule meetings, collect employee spending reimbursement, and more. Bots automate a lot of the simple communication tasks in the workplace.

Discord is one of the main communication platforms for the Web3 era. It's used by nearly every NFT community and crypto-gaming-related community. With that, a new wave of utility bots emerged. MEE6 is a bot that will moderate communication and flag users who are using hateful or offensive language. Quillbot will paraphrase, summarize, and/or translate text. Apollo is a scheduling bot for coordinating events. The Dash Radio bot makes adding ad-free music streams to Discord effortless. GiveawayBot will coordinate an entire giveaway contest. Dank Memer is a bot that suggests the right memes to share at the right time. This list could go on for pages.

      Today, there is a bot for augmenting nearly any digital task you can imagine from communication to collaboration to productivity. By 2032, these bots will find a new home in the Metaverse and play a companion role in making the Metaverse professionally and personally effective. Until someone figures out a way to bring keyboards into the Metaverse, spoken language will need to be the interface. This means that bots will play a crucial role in carrying out some of our actions there.

      Think of R2-D2 or C-3PO in Star Wars. While they were ultra-complex robots with personalities and critical thinking abilities, at their core they are like the bots we use today in Discord to automate tasks. Likewise, our bots will visually manifest in the Metaverse in the form of digital humans—taking them out of running in the background and bringing them into our field of view through 3D avatars.

      In other words, digital humans will give our utility bots a presence in our Metaverse homes. Companies like UneeQ, Synthesia, and Soul Machines have been designing lifelike, AI-powered digital humans for years. They're an upgrade to the typical chatbots we encounter on the phone or on the Web, providing a visual interface to automated customer service calls. Notably, UneeQ designed a digital human for UBS (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS) that would deliver financial forecasts and updates to their clients at any hour of the day. Synthesia's digital humans have manifested into the first AI-led meteorology team, delivering an entirely automated weather forecast. One of Soul Machines' many use cases is the digital human named Yumi, which is a skin care consultant and ambassador for a premium Japanese beauty and cosmetic brand.

The tech that is being used to create these lifelike, AI-powered digital humans will be overlaid on the aforementioned utility bots to give them an actual presence in our Metaverse homes. They'll inhabit our spaces, only if we invite them, of course, sitting idly in the background until we need them to carry out a task. Imagine a Metaverse bot that curates new Metaverse experiences for you—finding events, games, and communities you may like. How about a bot that manages your schedule and also learns from your productivity habits?

      There may even be bots that communicate on our behalf. For example, we're reminded of a project created by Hassan S. Ali back in 2017 called the Boy Bye Bot. Women who were continuously hounded by men for their phone number could give them the phone number to the Boy Bye Bot, which would then take care of (hilariously) turning these men away. Similarly, around the same time, there was a chatbot platform that emerged called Replika. The project was created by Eugenia Kuyda in remembrance of one of her best friends who passed away unexpectedly. She designed a chatbot from her text messages with her friend and found that the chatbot learned his texting quips and nuances. It helped her cope with him not being there anymore. This eventually became the Replika platform, which is a chatbot that actually takes an interest in what you're up to and how you're feeling. Hundreds of thousands of people treat this digital companion as a close friend.

The Ubiquitous Metaverse

      By 2032, each and every one of us will have the opportunity to easily build our own Metaverse homes and fill them with personal and professional tools. Bots will take shape as digital humans, helping us carry out and automate tasks. If our Metaverse homes are our own personal curated environment for productive digital work, connecting with new people, and organizing around interests, then the Metaverse bots are what will help us make these interactions happen.

Of course, there is a lot more to the Metaverse including NFTs and digital assets, gaming, collectibles, brand activations, commerce, avatars, digital identities, and much more. Throughout the book, we'll color in this vision of how the Metaverse will manifest in our lives. This is just a taste; one flavor of the Metaverse that will help bring it to ubiquity.

      These personal Metaverse homes are what will help us organize our favorite parts of the Metaverse. The Metaverse bots will help us be more productive and effective. Both of these will help lay the foundation for services, brands, and products to enter the Metaverse and create mass utility.

      John Riccitiello, in the previously mentioned interview with The Information, explained that “Apps like Instagram that rely on touch screens and games like Grand Theft Auto that use controllers just won't work well on headsets.” He said, “All of these things are going to have to be reinvented for that market because the user interface, the way you immerse yourself in those devices, is so radically different.”

      News sites like The New York Times or Washington Post may manifest as newspapers that show up at our Metaverse homes' doorstep. Instagram may port us to the Metaverse homes of our friends. Salesforce may become a Metaverse bot that operates as your CRM (Customer Relationship Management (CRM) utilizes technology to help companies improve business relationships, stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability) assistant in your Metaverse home office.

      The Metaverse is changing how we interact with everything digital. Our relationship with all of the digital conveniences, content, services, and interests will find its way to this future landscape. Coca-Cola had the idea to show up in virtual environments as far back as 2007. Fifteen years later we can confidently say that they were on the right track. And a decade from now we may call them one of the true visionary brands of the Metaverse.