Get Ready For The Chat Bot Revolution: They're Simple, Cheap And About To Be Everywhere

When we’ve got our noses poked into smartphones for hours each day, it's hard to believe that apps are starting to hit the end of the road. Yet studies consistently show that smartphone users have condensed their daily screentime time into just a handful of favourite apps, often a browser, a couple of chat and social apps and maybe a game or two.

With dwindling opportunities to make money from mobile apps, some developers are now looking to chat bots as another route to making mobile software that people might actually use, and one day even pay for.

There are thousands of chat bots on Telegram, a two-and-a-half-year-old messaging app headquartered in Berlin with 100 million active users. The chat bots are free to use, and you can chat to them by simply sending them a message, as if they were a human user.

There’s a TriviaBot for answering trivia questions, a Random Reddit Fun bot which pulls GIFs and images from the /funny subreddit on the popular sharing site, or HangBot, a hangman-style game.

Publishers are exploring ways to use bots as a means to reach readers too. Today FORBES launched its experimental Forbesbot on Telegram, which pings users with news stories or runs a search. All of these bots work through the same chat interface you’d use to talk with a friend, but with a few tweaks to make them more user friendly.

Bots started by accident on Telegram.

“At first there were a number of bots that were connecting people like dating services do,” says Pavel Durov, Telegram’s founder, who also founded Vkontakte, known as the Facebook of Russia. “You could potentially make a Tinder-like application within a messaging app. And we saw that happening, bots connecting strangers.” Durov noticed other bots popping up that people could chat to to get showtimes for movie theatres or bus-time-table information.

“At that point we realized we needed to build a more sophisticated platform optimized for bot developers,” says Durov. Then in January 2016 Telegram rolled out “inline bots,” which allowed you to type out a bot’s name like @imdb or @wiki and a search term, prompting suggested content to pop up on the screen.

Bots are relatively quick and easy to make, but developers still struggle to market them.

The developer behind @my_ali_bot, which lets you browse products on Chinese e-commerce site MyAliExpress on Telegram, says it took him a week to build the bot, which had about 38,000 users in January.

The bot makes a some money from referral links, “but I don’t have much profit,” says its developer, Sergey Pereskokov, 26. “It’s hard to get bot users in general because people don’t know about bots existing, and Telegram doesn’t promote bots much.”

Moscow-based Igor Polyakov, 25, is the developer behind MyPokerBot on Telegram, which has around 40,000 users. It took him and a colleague one month to build the bot from scratch by working evenings and weekends as a side project; Polyakov is a games developer by day.

Right now he’s waiting for Telegram to switch on a payments mechanism for bots (which Durov says is coming this year), making it possible to sell in-game currency or premium status to players. “When the payments API is released, Telegram’s bot platform will automatically become more interesting for developers.”

Since most chat bots aren’t powered by artificial intelligence software, they rely on a cleverly-structured foundation of menu options.

The Weatherman bot on Telegram, for instance, sometimes replaces the keyboard with a menu of five buttons you can tap to get relevant information.

You could call these “smart messages,” according to Beerud Sheth, the CEO of enterprise messaging service Gupshup.

This week Gupshup, which sells messaging technology to e-commerce companies, is now also calling itself a “bot factory”: it is essentially selling the tools that developers can use to create their own bots.

“We’re the furthest ahead in terms of developer tools for building advanced bots,” says Sheth. “Not just simple chit chat bots. Things where you can do proper workflows and transactions.”

Bots built on Gupshup’s platform can work across Slack, Twitter, WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or Kik, says Sheth. Messaging might seem like a overly simple and limited way to create software, but Sheth points out that developers can integrate menus, polls, location trackers and forms straight into them. “Think of it as a mini version of a web page,” he says. “In the message you have clickable elements.”

Bots don’t have to be smart, he emphasises, just very-well designed. “There’s a lot of confusion around this,” says Sheth. “When you talk about bots the word conjures visions of robots and A.I.”

But bots are just another way to describe the new way we’ll be interacting with computers and the Web over the next few years. “Previously you had websites, then we had apps, and now there’s going to be bots. It’s still simple and utilitarian. You don’t think of A.I.-oriented websites or A.I.-apps. The Internet today still has very little A.I. and it is still very useful.”

The best way to get a sense of how that might work is to look at where bots have already morphed into a full-blown phenomenon, on China’s popular WeChat messaging platform. Here’s a screenshot of the menu for Beijin’s Dian DouDe restaurant. It’s not a mobile website, but an “official account” for the restaurant on WeChat:

Official accounts like Dian DouDe's are like verified accounts that sit alongside regular users on the chat app. They can take payments, scan a QR code or integrate a bot.

One official account on the app, called Chumen Wenwen, is a digital assistant bot that acts like Google Now or Siri, which WeChat users can access to book flights or hotels.

But it’s important to note that WeChat is not entirely made up of bots. Many of the 10 million official accounts on WeChat have a mixture of real-live customer service agents and automated replies (or bots).

“The way messaging in general is headed is like what Facebook is going for, a hybrid,” says Andrew Schorr, CEO of Grata, which sells customer service software for several dozen automotive and hospitality companies who are on WeChat. Grata’s software makes it possible for live, customer service agents to talk to users on WeChat, booking test drives for instance.

Telegram and WeChat appear to be going in different directions with bots. Schorr points out that Telegram has created a more open platform for bots to thrive, whereas WeChat has limited what bots can do. Automated replies are often key-word messages like, “reply 1 to see our business hours,” or “reply 2 to get directions to our store.”

Polyakov, the poker bot developer, doesn’t see bots on Telegram becoming like the more colourful webpage-accounts of WeChat anytime soon: “I think it's Pavel Durov’s style to create quite a simple service.”

That could make it harder for bot developers like Polyakov to pitch their bot-building skills to businesses. Polyakov recently tried reaching out to Russian e-commerce firms, an alcoholic beverage company and home-cleaning service to ask about developing bots for them, but they didn’t respond. There are still many limitations with bots, he concedes, though that could change in time.

With less room for bots to jump in where humans cannot, the challenge for businesses on WeChat is to reply to customers within a few seconds of their first enquiry, with 12 seconds being the target, according to Schorr.

WeChat will also struggle to compete with Facebook as the latter company expands its Messenger platform and invites businesses to use it as a place to communicate with customers.  “They already have the rest of the world using Facebook, and the part not using Facebook is using WhatsApp,” says Schorr.

So far more than two dozen businesses are exploring ways to chat with customers on Messenger, Facebook says, using both live customer service agents and bots. Facebook’s experimental, digital-assistant M is basically a showcase for other businesses, to show them ways to elegantly combine bot-and-human, to chat with customers. “You’ll talk to a human when you need to, but you’ll get a lot solved with their A.I.,” says Schorr.

Bots are going to evolve very quickly, says Gupshup’s Sheth. “So far most of them have been toys. They’re cute, they’re amazing and they work. But are they becoming heavily, daily-used bots? That’s where it’s emerging. Some of the companies we work with use bots for employee surveys, sales tracking, learning and training.” It’s taking longer for bots to go mainstream with consumers because messaging apps haven’t opened up their APIs (application programming interfaces) to make that possible.

When developers have no access to a messaging app’s API, their bot is just like any other regular user, which makes it impossible to engage with hundreds of thousands of people at once. “No smartphone will support that,” says Sheth. “You need APIs. You need to connect directly to the app's server.”

Slack and Telegram are the most open platforms when it comes to creating bots. But Facebook and WhatsApp have both said they are planning to invite more businesses onto their platforms, which means they'll probably make it possible to launch bots on their networks too.

Facebook will give further details on its plans to invite businesses to create bots on Messenger when it holds its F8 conference for developers in April, according to multiple sources who have knowledge of Facebook’s plans.

Facebook will have tricky details to work through with its next tranche of businesses, such as how to handle spam and abuse on the platform by bots. But its investment in the technology shows it’s serious about chat and bots as the platforms for entirely new types of software that we’ll interact with on a daily basis.

“Developers are going to shift from making apps to making bots,” says Sheth. “About once every decade in the history of the tech industry, we’ve had these paradigm shifts.” In the mid-90s the world switched to the desktop, and then in the mid 2000’s it moved to mobile apps. “Predictably on schedule, in the mid-teens, we’re moving to the bot era.”

“I think it’s safe to say you’re going to have millions of bots,” he adds. “In 2016 you’ll probably see thousands, maybe tens of thousands. But this will explode over the next 12 months because the cost of building a bot is lower, messaging is already widely established, it’s going to spread a lot faster, and businesses are going to emerge very rapidly. And we’ll wonder what the world looked like before the world of bots.”