Chatbots have lately become very trendy, being present on all major messaging services.
According to Tech Crunch, Waterloo-based Kik has a young, dedicated audience of users already showing great interest in bots. Kik CEO Ted Livingston divulged onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY that the messaging app now boasts more than 6,000 bots.
Kik is among the first mobile chat apps that started the chatbots trend. Now others have pursued the trend, including Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Artificial intelligence bots are suddenly all the rage. Big tech seems to love chatbots and almost every tech company seems interested in this new A.I. trend.
A chatbot is a simple artificial intelligence system that can interact with users via text. User-bot interactions can be straightforward, like asking a bot to give you the location of a nearby restaurant, or more complex, like having one troubleshoot a computer issue.
The explosion of chatbots on the Internet has become possible due to a lot of factors coming together. Among them is the fact that Internet users are tired of downloading apps.
According to NBC News, Matthew Hartman, head of seed investment at Betaworks, said that users are thinking that they do not want to download apps, particularly if they think they might not really need them. Hartman added that Internet users prefer chat and they have moved into messenger apps.
Betaworks' new program seeks to bring small bots into the mainstream. Chatbots can easily be added to apps that people already have. This way, users can get engaged with bots.
Peter Lee, corporate vice president of Microsoft Research, said in an email that they assist now to the rise of lots of useful conversational platforms such as Skype IM, Twitter, Telegram, Line, Slack, WeChat or SMS/txt.
An early bot was created in the 1960s. However, advances in natural language processing, web search services, AI technology, machine learning and cloud power made current chatbots possible all of a sudden.
