What is a bot?
In this context bots are computer assistants. They will appear in your favourite messaging app including Facebook Messenger and Skype. You can use them for booking flights, hotels, ordering takeaway and much, much more. The word bot can be used to mean several different things. Gamers understand bots as AI characters in a game, while botnets are groups of hijacked computers which cyber criminals use for various tasks such as sending out millions of spam emails or even to attack and attempt to take down websites. The bots we’re talking about here are essentially virtual assistants, much like Alexa, Siri and Cortana, but they communicate via text rather than speech. Cortana and Google Assistant already do this, of course.
Bot history
Bots aren’t new. Far from it. Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a ‘bot’ called ELIZA in 1966 which grew to immense popularity. The program simulated a Rogerian therapist and you could ‘talk’ to it by typing, and it would respond in the way a therapist would with answers such as “How does that make you feel?” It appeared to pass the Turing Test – a test in which humans had to decide if the responses on screen were from a human or a computer – but in reality it lacked intelligence and would fail the test under most conditions. It wasn’t until 2014 when Eugene Goostman, a program which simulates a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy was claimed to pass it (some disputed this claim).
Modern bots
They go beyond the capabilities of Siri and Google Now, although in many respects they are similar. At a basic level, both ‘services’ are intelligent, but they’re a million miles from being as capable as a system like Jarvis in Iron Man. Jarvis, of course, doesn’t really exist (Mark Zuckerberg has declared that his personal challenge for 2016 is to build a Jarvis of sorts). It appears that Zuckerberg has been inspired partly by the work Facebook has done with bots in Messenger. Facebook M is currently being trialled by a small group of people in California, but will no doubt soon be appearing in everyone’s Messenger app. It will have many of the capabilities we’ve mentioned: it can answer questions like Siri can, find a suitable birthday present for your daughter and book a table at a restaurant, but it will also be powered by real people who can assist when the AI technology reaches its limits. There are plenty of chat bots in Skype, including IFTTT, SkyScanner, Hipmunk and Stubhub. IFTTT could be useful for those that actively use the service, while the SkyScanner video below shows how chat bots can be a part of a group conversation and provide assistance when booking flights: An example of a bot is Nissan’s new Micra chatbot. It asks questions about your personality and tells you what colour car you should be driving.
Microsoft spent a considerable portion of its Build keynote last year talking about bots and how they would make your life easier. In one demo, a bot was used to order a pizza. It sounds simple, but it highlighted how much easier it was to give your order through a bot rather than firing up an app, navigating through menus and selecting options.
Could bots replace apps?
Bots let you use natural language to get tasks done. This is one of the reasons many people use Siri or Cortana to check the weather forecast, set a reminder or send an email: it’s just faster. (See also: 40 funny things to ask Cortana.)
The new generation of bots will be primarily text based. Unlike Cortana, you can’t type and get Siri to do your bidding, but typing is the preferable option in many situations. When you’re commuting or sitting at your office desk, talking into a microphone is less comfortable than typing on a screen or keyboard. We all spend more time using messaging apps than pretty much any other these days, and it’s in these you’ll find the new bots. It should be no surprise that Microsoft is putting bots into Skype, and if you’ve ever used Slack, your first interaction is with Slackbot, which teaches you how to use the app. But as bots increase in their capabilities, we’ll start to use apps less. Right now, you probably flip between a few different apps to book a weekend away. It’s the same if you’re search for something you want to buy locally: you might go to a website, search for a product, check stock and then get directions in Google maps to show you how to get there. Bots will be able to do all this for you: no need to search Google any more, no need to launch the Uber app. Anyone who has invested in smart home kit should benefit from a bot in the future. Today, you have to launch various apps to accomplish different tasks: turn up the heating, flick on the lights, play some music. In the (hopefully near) future, you’ll be able to get a bot to do it all in one go.
Bots: the future
It’s extremely likely the Apple is working hard behind the scenes to make Siri do this, because its capabilities and intelligence haven’t significantly improved since it launched. But more than anything, it needs to make Siri work universally rather than only kit designed for it. Of course, bots will be limited by the platforms on which they run. So if you’re using Facebook M or Skype on an iPhone, it will be limited by what iOS can do, or what Apple will let it do. But Google is also busy building bots, and it will be fascinating to see what appears in both Android N and iOS 10. Over the next few months we can expect bots to start appearing in the big messaging apps, and we can look forward to being able to order that lunchtime pizza in a snap. Download the latest version of Skype and you’ll see a new button that lets you add several experimental chatbots to your contacts. (Read more: Best free chatbots for iPhone.)
Jim has been testing and reviewing products for over 20 years. His main beats include VPN services and antivirus. He also covers smart home tech, mesh Wi-Fi and electric bikes.
