Bots are programs that interact through messaging. The reason why they are becoming popular today is because messaging is huge. Statistics show that Smartphone usage is decreasing in terms of the number of apps people use on a daily basis. People have reached an app fatigue. On the other hand, the usage of messaging apps has been on a rise. Basically, users have favored messaging as a medium and bots are just a mechanism for programs to get on to that medium and interact with users.

By Beerud Sheth

Founder & CEO | gupshup.io

Nov 16, 2016

It is clear by now that bots represent a major paradigm shift. Every brand and business will soon need to build bots. As developers and businesses start building bots, a lot of tools and platforms are emerging to make bot building easier. Not all bot platforms are equal.

Smooch.io is a platform that enables communication between a business and its customers. Smooch allows businesses to get distribution across channels and talk to customers over social messaging apps, SMS, web etc without additional development time.  

While many of the early bots have been simple bots with limited capabilities, we’re now starting to see advanced bots emerging.

By advanced bots, we mean bots focused on business-critical use-cases with rich features and functionality along with a large-scale user-base. These bots have carefully crafted conversational interfaces. They use natural language capabilities to enable unstructured user queries. They are well scripted with a consistent personality and tone of voice. They enable real mission-critical use-cases. And they’re designed to scale for a global audience.