There are various search engines for bots, such as Chatbottle, Botlist and Thereisabotforthat, for example, helping developers to inform users about the launch of new talkbots. These sites also provide a ranking of bots by various parameters: the number of votes, user statistics, platforms, categories (travel, productivity, social interaction, e-commerce, entertainment, news, etc.). They feature more than three and a half thousand bots for Facebook Messenger, Slack, Skype and Kik.
In this era of information, businesses are able to take advantage of social media platforms to aid communication between their brand and their customers. Such seamless connectivity allows for a more transparent business exchange between the brand and its consumers. Just a decade ago, direct consumer brand interaction was either relatively impossible, or lengthy and cumbersome at the best. Social media has since then bridged this gap.
Previous generations of chatbots were present on company websites, e.g. Ask Jenn from Alaska Airlines which debuted in 2008[29] or Expedia's virtual customer service agent which launched in 2011.[29][30] The newer generation of chatbots includes IBM Watson-powered "Rocky", introduced in February 2017 by the New York City-based e-commerce company Rare Carat to provide information to prospective diamond buyers.[31][32]
However, as irresistible as this story was to news outlets, Facebook’s engineers didn’t pull the plug on the experiment out of fear the bots were somehow secretly colluding to usurp their meatbag overlords and usher in a new age of machine dominance. They ended the experiment due to the fact that, once the bots had deviated far enough from acceptable English language parameters, the data gleaned by the conversational aspects of the test was of limited value.
Messenger Bots are created using the new Messenger API that allows a bot to send and receive messages. The Messenger Bots are essentially chat bots that you can talk to from the Messenger app. The conversations will of course be different than those you have with your Facebook friends. These bots are meant to help you get information for example you can ask the CNN bot to tell you give you the current headline news and it will fetch them for you.
