What the data says about Valentine’s Day and chatbots

In honor of Valentine’s Day, we took a look at the difference in usage between men and women on Facebook Messenger bots over the past two months.

Who uses bots more: Men or women?

On average, about 63 percent of bot users are men and 28 percent are women, with the remaining 9 percent unknown or undetected.

Men tend to be more engaged than women in terms of sessions per user per month  —  on average they have about 50 percent more sessions. Women, however, tend to message more per session  –  about 12 percent more messages in each session.

In regards to the number of bots men and women use: While the vast majority of users have only used one bot, about 14 percent of men and 10.6 percent of women use more than one bot.

A picture says a thousand words

We examined images sent in to Facebook bots to see if there are any differences between men and women. We ran the images through Amazon’s Rekognition API for image detection, which detects labels and a confidence level. Below are the top labels detected with confidence levels over 90 percent.

While both men and women send a lot of selfies to bots, women tend to skew a bit heavily to sending selfies. The labels Person, Human, People, and Portrait are all detected in selfies. One thing that was interesting is the label “Electronics” —  why are women taking pictures of electronics? Do you know why that is? It turns out this indicates when a selfie is taken in the mirror, so the photo contains an image of the phone, which triggers the “Electronics” label. Guys tend to take more photos of cars and motorcycles than women do, which is why you see Vehicle and Car as well.

Speaking of selfies…

Another interesting takeaway from looking at the images sent in to bots is the NSFW images  — our poor eyes!

It turns out both men and women send NSFW images to bots, including naked selfies; however it’s predominantly men  —  about 90 percent of the NSFW images come from men.

Luckily, the overall percentage of NSFW images is quite low — only about 2.5 percent of images are NSFW, and only about 6 percent of bots receive them.

The interesting thing is, even though the percentage of users and images is quite low, when someone does send an NSFW image, they send it a lot!! The average NSFW image is sent almost 5 times, compared to once for a “normal,” non-NSFW image. In fact, some users have even sent the same NSFW image over 100 times! Apparently once you get over the hurdle of sending a naked selfie, you’re OK with sending it a lot.

Bots, how do we love thee

Finally, we looked at user sentiment to see if there are any differences between men and women.

It turns out, on average, per bot, the sentiment for men and women is about the same  —  how they feel about a bot, whether positive or negative, tends to be about the same.

Since this is Valentine’s Day and love is in the air, we took a look at how many users express their love for the bots they’re using. It turns out women are a bit more likely, at 1.4 percent versus about 1 percent of men, to tell the bots they’re using that they love it!