2020 has arrived and technology continues to grow at beats to continue to revolutionize our way of life in all aspects. One of the sectors that have benefited the most are the businesses and organizations, whose needs to showcase their products through web platforms and interact with their customers, have been resolved in a certain way thanks to bots.

Today, more and more mobile devices are integrating 'bots' to interact and anticipate the likes of users, but what are these bots?

General idea about bots

Bot is derived from the term robot and is the software version of the term. Simply put, it is an application developed to carry out a different number of tasks autonomously.

It's often easier to chat with a bot than to search/read through a text wall. "Chatbots" for example use natural language processing to join users messages with the appropriate responses. In the following image we can see an example between a human user and a bot:

One very important thing to mention is that when talking about bots:

• It's not just AI.
• It's not just about natural language processing.
• It's not just text interfaces.

So... What is a bot?

Bots are systems that allow users to interact with applications or services in the same way they would if they were talking to someone else. This allows you to carry out actions such as ordering food or ordering a taxi comfortably and naturally.

Bots can not only interact with people, but they can also communicate with each other to perform tasks. An important aspect to mention is that there are different types depending on their function.

The best-known types of bots

The following describes some of the types of bots:

• Chatbots: Its function is to simulate a conversation with humans, informationing and trying to solve doubts.

• Crawlers: collect information from other APIs or websites.

• Informational Bots: Help manage the data that is published in information channels.

• Transactional Bots: acts as in intermediaries between people and external media.

• Hackers: its main function is to distribute viruses and perform fraudulent actions (e.g. Botnets)

• Spam Bots: Designed to send spam in a way.

• Game Bots: These are playable bots (e.g. Chess).

The most common uses of bots

Currently, bots can be introduced in multiple sectors thanks to their availability, usability and their simple incorporation into the main communication channels (e.g. Facebook Messenger or Telegram), which has allowed bots to be the perfect solution for different use cases.

Taking into account all of the above, the most common uses of bots are usually applied in the following tasks:

• Order automation.
• Request reservations in restaurants.
• Customer service.
• Request for medical assistance.

The impact of bots in the modern era

Bots represent a real revolution in the way we transact on the internet and our daily tasks. According to Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, "Bots will be the apps of the future and spoken language the new way of interacting."

Nowadays, we no longer have to enter a website or an application and fill out a form but simply express the action that we want to carry out in the form of conversation and the bot will understand it.

For example, if we want to book a flight, we will naturally have to say to our bot: "Book a flight to Bogota on June 3rd" and already; the bot will ask us a series of questions to gather all the information required to carry out the transaction.

A video example about a chatbot:

In the relatively near future, the trend is on generating bots with increasing processing capacity thanks to the implementation of new concepts and services in the field of Artificial Intelligence. In the case of chatbots, their use continues to grow exponentially, allowing them to generalize messaging applications that will make these bots a common form of interaction between consumers and businesses.

Also, the future should be questioned and validated the idea of "bots like new appps", since visiting a website or running a mobile application to solve a particular problem will soon be a habit of the past. This whole definition will be replaced by a much simpler action: formulate our doubts to a chatbot, order some action, and have it carried out.

What's next?

The bot world is really fascinating, isn't it? In an upcoming article, we'll have a tutorial to learn in a simple way how to implement a chatbot on Telegram through the resources available in Microsoft Azure.

Thanks for reading!
I hope you found it interesting.

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