What is a bot?
A bot is software that is designed to automate the kinds of tasks you would usually do on your own - like making a dinner reservation, adding an appointment to your calendar or fetching and displaying information. The increasingly common form of bots, chatbots, simulate conversation. They often live inside messaging apps — or are at least designed to look that way — and it should feel like you’re chatting back and forth as you would with a human.
What can bots do?
Essentially bots can do a whole lot of things - they simplify stuff which would normally require a telephone call to a human agent.
Where are bots currently used?
It’s quite soon to say with surety how extensively bots are being used. As of now bots are being used on major social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter etc) There are FAQ bots, but again its difficult to say how far they are being used.
Why should anyone use Bots?
Bots happen to be an element that is still being explored in terms of its development and usage -
- 30% users are deceived by bots when they land on social sites
- 7% Tweeps are spam bots With stats like these, its too early to say how far we can go with bots. But having a bot might be one way in which you can drive meaningful traffic and also engage users. A bot reduces work, who doesn’t want that?
Social Media
As of now bots have a major footing in the social media space,
- Amazon uses a recommendation system - you might have seen this when you browse for books on their site
- So this recommendation system is a bot - so what it does is, you pick a book and the system recommends similar books that you should read
- Having an actual bot will reduce the presence of fake bots
- Bots can also persuade users to buy stuff
- By making bots, you have a sure shot at winning with your competition
- Bots can influence opinions (after all your goal is to get the user on to your side - bots are a way to do that)
- They even influence the topics that are trending - a bot picks up on the stuff that are trending, and its bound to be on top!
- Let’s face it - you make a bot - you’re given real power over the world of media that is owned by people who run millions of social bots. That’s huge!
From all this information we have narrowed it down to these areas where we can make bots,
1. Recommendation Bot for houses and real estate
Primarily employed in Real Estate and Housing firms
- A user comes in, feeds the area and type of space (say apartment, independent house, villa, office space etc.), maybe also give the price that he/she is looking at and the bot will come up with suggestions
- Like Tinder, the user can swipe right (if he’s willing to take consider the space) and left (if he’s ruled it out).
2. For Education
Can be applied to the News/Print Agency, Educational Institutions, Training Centers, Counselling Centres and such
- A news agency or university has over 100 years of news and information in their inventory - that is huge and important information collected over a significant period of time - it might be difficult to consolidate all of this information, but it can be done.
- So let’s say a 12th grader comes up on the site and encounters this bot, he/she types “What to do to become a lawyer like Mr. XYZ?”
- The bot goes through it’s information reserve and shows the career path (taking in the interest, quota, marks, budget etc.) that the student should take to achieve that particular goal
3. Conversational Bot
HR Compliance is one area where this bot can be applied to. There are many other areas where this can be implemented as well - the bot has to be trained to work in that particular area.
- Aims to lower the barrier to understanding a company’s policies
- In our market research we found that the majority of employees break rules because they don’t know the rules - employees do not spend time in understanding the company policies, since they’re just too many of them!
- This bot will skim through thousands of company policy documents and will generate contextual meaning from them - so when an employees asks “How many holidays can I take in a year?”, our bot can respond with, “You allowed unto 12 paid holidays per year.”
- This bot will work with free form text, whereas other bots in the market can work only with structured information (like an FAQ bot)
- Here you can feed the bot with as much as information that you want and the bot can learn from them instantly
4. An FAQ bot or something like the Slackbot
There’s a lot of people building bots for Slack and other similar platforms, so we’re going to stay off it for sometime 😋
For now these are four major areas where we’ve made bots. Now there are just too many areas that you can build bots for, and we’re slowly delving into that as well. If there’s an area that you think requires a bot, reach out to us and we’ll see how we can make a bot that suits your need - and if you think there’s an area that can never use a bot, then let us know more, we’d love to take up that challenge and build a bot!