When you talk about chat, WeChat will invariably pop up in conversation. At 1.1 billion accounts and 650 million MAUs and hosting a multitude of services from paying your water bill, booking a doctor’s appointment, getting a McDonald’s delivery and even buying a car, WeChat is an exciting vision of how messaging could be the portal to all services in the future.

“The medium is the message” – Marshall McLuhan

The number of chatbots is on the rise and the behavior of these chatbots will be a defining metric of its usability. A chatbot uses the conversation as its interface. Users do not appreciate magic, and that can be prevented by understanding the expectations of the user.

Facebook generated a buzz in the tech world with the launch of chatbots on their Messenger platform. Since then more than 10,000 developers have started building bots on the Facebook platform alone. This staggering number is bound to increase exponentially as more messaging apps are opening up their platforms to chat bots.

By Beerud Sheth

Founder & CEO | gupshup.io

May 17, 2016

Bots are exciting. Everyone is talking about it and everyone wants to build one. Some of the early bots have gotten mixed reviews — they’re interesting, but they’re essentially toys. As people start working bots with more capabilities, developers must appreciate and plan for the entire bot lifecycle. From our experience building hundreds of advanced bots, and helping developers build thousands more, below is what we see as the end-to-end bot building process.

Starting this July, when customer service employees at Overstock.com are too sick to come to work, they’ll tell Mila they’re not feeling well using an app on their phones or computers. “I’m sorry to hear that,” Mila will respond. After a short exchange about logistics, Mila will send a message to the appropriate manager, who will adjust the employee’s schedule. It sounds like a typical interaction with an office assistant. But Mila isn’t an assistant. She’s a Chatbots.

Gupshup has announced the launch of its new bot builder platform, gupshup.io in India. The Gupshup.io platform consists of omni-channel messaging APIs and bot builder tools. The omni-channel APIs enable connectivity to almost every messaging channel including SMS, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram, Teamchat etc, with more to be added soon. The bot builder tools support the entire bot life-cycle including development, testing, deployment, hosting, publishing, monitoring, tracking, search and discovery of bots.