Bots the Buzz?

"Bots are the new apps," Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella declared during a conference in San Francisco in March. While most tech giants have been leveraging the power of chatbots - Apple with Siri, Amazon with Alexa, Google with Google Assistant, Microsoft with Cortana and Tay - Facebook, too, joined in by opening up its Messenger APIs (application program interface), for brands to deploy chatbots on its app. It has been a runaway success - within just three months of launch around 11,000 chatbots have been developed by businesses on Facebook Messenger. Other platforms such as Slack and Telegram host around 1,000 bots.

A chatbot is a chat-based interface that can stimulate conversations with humans, and deliver information or services on demand. According to cloud messaging service platform Gupshup, 350+ Indian developers are using its site to develop bots. Some of the early movers are Meru Cabs, Lybrate, FactorDaily, YES Bank, Voonik, Naptol, Railyatri, HDFC Bank and Yatra.com. Niki.ai and MagicX are new bot-only start-ups offering taxi hailing, food delivery and bill payment services on a single platform.

What does a chatbot do? Beerud Sheth, Founder and CEO of Gupshup, says, "Bots can be used by businesses to communicate with their customers and employees, for e-commerce, customer support, business processes, and more." For instance, Falcon Control System, a start-up, has developed a bot to operate home appliances, while companies such as Meru Cabs, Voonik (online fashion start-up) and Lybrate (online doctor consultation platform) have launched chatbots to help them deliver primary functions. Meru claims about 400 users interact with its chatbot daily on Facebook Messenger. FactorDaily, a tech website, has a bot that gets you stories based on certain topics. "We will probably move away from that as there is no value in throwing web page links at users coming on bots. The value is in summarising the content you have and making it engaging," says Titash Neogi, CTO, FactorDaily. Its bot engaged in over 250 conversations on Facebook Messenger within a month.

What gives chatbots an upper hand over apps? Nimesh Shah, Founder of Windchimes Communications, says, "The regular app takes a lot of space. Also, every app has a different UI and learning each is time consuming. With a chatbot, you are doing away with all of that, because your bots reside within a messaging system. They are faster and easy to load."

Creating bots on a platform like Facebook Messenger is a great proposition for businesses because of its enviable 900 million active user base. Besides, while smartphone apps are ruling the roost today, they are reaching a saturation point. Nilesh Sangoi, CTO, Meru Cabs, says, "Newer apps are finding it difficult to get discovered on the app store amidst millions of other apps." With reports suggesting that 80 per cent of a user's time is spent on the top five apps and that younger audiences prefer texting to making calls, how can brands ignore chatbots?

However, this technology is still a work in progress. Chatbots' inability to understand languages and the lack of speech recognition makes chatting with them difficult at times. CNN and the US-based 1-800-Flowers have had to bear the brunt of this on Facebook Messenger. "Problems arise when inputs have not been structured. If you write something that the bot does not understand, it will give you funny responses. So, it is not a platform problem, but that of artificial intelligence," informs Saurabh Arora, Founder and CEO, Lybrate.

Bots also pose security risks. With every conversation, they gather new information about the user, which is not necessarily confidential. It will be a while before bots can truly become a 'friend' we can trust.

Listening Post

Coming of Age

Image sharing app Snapchat, which is known for its popularity among teenagers, is now gaining fans among older millennials (25-34) and people above 35 years of age. According to a research report by comScore, only 5 per cent of smartphone users between the ages of 25 and 34 were using Snapchat three years ago; now, the share has increased to an impressive 38 per cent. Similarly, three years ago, only 2 per cent of the 35-plus smartphone users were active on Snapchat; today, 14 per cent of them are on the app. As per the report, this rise in adult users has not deterred teenagers and younger people from using the app. Snapchat saw a 69 per cent increase in usage among the 8-24 age group of smartphone users - its all-time high. The report credits the introduction of new product features by Snapchat for this rise in age diversity.

News in Check

Chinas Internet censorship body has warned online media companies against using social media as a source of news without approval in, what it claims to be, a bid to counter fake news and rumours. "It is forbidden to use hearsay to create news or use conjecture and imagination to distort the facts," the warning states. It has also listed a number of fake news stories that were recently circulated on the Internet. The development comes days after Chinas censorship Internet chief Xu Lin stepped down. China has already banned social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.