Efforts by servers hosting websites to counteract bots vary. Servers may choose to outline rules on the behaviour of internet bots by implementing a robots.txt file: this file is simply text stating the rules governing a bot's behaviour on that server. Any bot that does not follow these rules when interacting with (or 'spidering') any server should, in theory, be denied access to, or removed from, the affected website. If the only rule implementation by a server is a posted text file with no associated program/software/app, then adhering to those rules is entirely voluntary – in reality there is no way to enforce those rules, or even to ensure that a bot's creator or implementer acknowledges, or even reads, the robots.txt file contents. Some bots are "good" – e.g. search engine spiders – while others can be used to launch malicious and harsh attacks, most notably, in political campaigns.[2]
A rapidly growing, benign, form of internet bot is the chatbot. From 2016, when Facebook Messenger allowed developers to place chatbots on their platform, there has been an exponential growth of their use on that forum alone. 30,000 bots were created for Messenger in the first six months, rising to 100,000 by September 2017.[8] Avi Ben Ezra, CTO of SnatchBot, told Forbes that evidence from the use of their chatbot building platform pointed to a near future saving of millions of hours of human labour as 'live chat' on websites was replaced with bots.[9]
Insidiously and persistently, Facebook is chipping away at other messaging platforms and moving their users to Facebook Messenger. If they keep it up, by the end of 2017 there will be as many people on Messenger (currently 900 million) as Facebook (1.674 billion). But, counterintuitive as that strategy seems (why bifurcate resources on two fronts) that is all part of Mark Zuckerberg’s avec nous le deluge.
There are lots of free chatbot building tools such as the one I run that offer the ability to setup a bot and connect it to facebook. You won’t require any coding knowledge, and you can sign up using your Facebook account. Once you’ve set up a free account you can start creating your chatbot. Make sure you keep these tips in mind when building your bot:
Please check out our main directory with 1376 live chatbot examples (an overview as maintained by developers themselves), our vendor listing with 256 chatbot companies and chatbot news section with already more than 370 articles! Our research tab contains lots of papers on chatbots, 1,166 journals on chatbots and 390 books on chatbots. This research section also shows which universities are active in the chatbot field, indicates which publishers are publishing journals on humanlike conversational AI and informs about academic events on chatbots. Also, check out our dedicated tab for awards, contest and games related to the chatbot field, various forums like our AI forum by chatbot enthusiasts and add any chatbot as created by yourself and your colleagues to our chatbot directory. Please do not forget to register to join us in these exciting times.
Simple chatbots work based on pre-written keywords that they understand. Each of these commands must be written by the developer separately using regular expressions or other forms of string analysis. If the user has asked a question without using a single keyword, the robot can not understand it and, as a rule, responds with messages like “sorry, I did not understand”.
Certainly for Facebook, this is much more about extracting marketing dollars than it is about breaking new ground in software development. Because by studying user’s interactions with these bots, Facebook will continue to build their understanding of how consumers are interacting with brands and gain additional insight into what products they like and content they consume. That can only mean more value to marketers and thus more dollars for Facebook.
Bots for Messenger are for anyone who's trying to reach people on mobile - no matter how big or small your company or idea is, or what problem you're trying to solve. Whether you're building apps or experiences to share weather updates, confirm reservations at a hotel, or send receipts from a recent purchase, bots make it possible for you to be more personal, more proactive, and more streamlined in the way that you interact with people.
