After IoT, it seems the wave is heading towards the Bot technology. They are the future of software, one by one all the IT giants tighten their belts. The race is on – Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Oracle, and many others have started to build platforms, tools, and services for bots. Early adopters explored its development tools, bot hosting, and marketing tools to initiate the development. Enterprises who were sick of a performance of mobile app against its costs started exploring bots. The research led them to the conclusion about its remarkable difference to their business.
Marketers are now interested in this new technology. Media outlets and tech magazines started mentioning it. This market has received enough attention and its progress is pretty interesting. The two main factors playing an integral role:
- Technology: Artificial intelligence is becoming a common service integrated with many bot frameworks, including Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Facebook.
- Funding: The Slack fund announced in July an investment in 14 startups. Many giants are increasing their investments. The gates are opening for revenues such as StatsBot, Kip, and Zoom.ai have already started to monetize.
Now, if we consider the classification some bots are just command languages while others are driven by natural language processing. The most intelligent bots exist in the arena of self-driving cars. Based on this we can say there are – Script Bots, Smart Bots, and Intelligent Agents.
Script Bots
The simplest form of bots is the Script Bots, which are platform based bots that run off of a pre-determined script. Script Bots are mostly used to execute transactional and informational requests. There are six main platforms used in script bots:
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Slack
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Twitter
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FB messenger
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KIK
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Telegram
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SMS
It is important that companies developing bots understand and respect the limitations of Script Bots + NLP. Also, it can be determined that these bots are confined to messaging platforms. When companies understand the limitations, Script Bots prove to be incredibly helpful agents.
Smart Bots
These smart bots are on the next level of intelligence. A Smart Bot works on AI with human intervention as a backup layer for complex commands.
Let’s take an example for better understanding – While dialing to a bank or customer care there is a list of question which you have to answer. This is a lengthy and tiring process. To eliminate that smart bots are introduced and now we can handle most tasks before talking to a customer service.
Intelligent Agents
Intelligent bots are designed to run without any human intervention. Siri, Chatbots, IBM Watson, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google’s Self-Driving Car are all created with the help of intelligent agents.
