Forget apps, messaging bots are the future!
No more tapping and switching between endless number of websites and apps, each with different interface to get used to. No more a sored thumb and wasting precious seconds of your life on opening and closing all these things. Sounds like a dream?
As current search and mobile app paradigm is reaching its limits the new alternative is emerging and moving us into a conversation-based era. Imagine that you can order take-out food, book a taxi and pay bills with only one message. And all that in one app! This can be done with a messaging app being basically a bot. The messaging bot technology is rapidly gaining traction and is shifting entire smartphone Internet experience to new “platformized” level.
Messaging apps are becoming the new platform which incorporates functions played by a mobile operating system, whereas bots are new mobile apps.
Messaging platforms such as WeChat, Line, Facebook, Slack and Telegram subsume third-party services which were previously independent apps so that the bots can automate conversation, actions, workflows and handle transactions in response to users’ queries from within a messaging interface.
When it comes to a messaging bot itself, it is a pogram simulating human activity that operates as an agent for a user or another program what in practice means that it can read and write messages just as a human. Messaging bots are build by developers to provide automated services through the messaging interface of the platforms.
So for example you can purchase goods and services through e-commerce bots, while food bots order pizza for you. And there are content bots as well which deliver relevant content such as news and weather. If you happen to do some banking or trade stocks there is also a suitable bot for you. When you want to automate some of your business workflows in finance, sales, HR, admin or operations a workflow bot is just perfect. IoT bots will take care of your smart home, car, washing machine and so on. And when you finally get overwhelmed with all these bots, your Personal Assistant bot will come to your aid and grip the whole communication with rest of your bots so that you will receive only the most important requests.
From a development standpoint, since bots involve server-side code which is faster to develop, easier to maintain and platform-independent, bots can reduce time to market for emerging startups and enable developers to reach product-market fir sooner.
Summing up all these benefits, it can be clearly seen that bots render our mobile experience better what, as a result, makes customer acquisition and retention way easier for mobile developers.
Sources:
http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/11/its-operating-systems-vs-messaging-apps-in-the-battle-for-techs-next-frontier/#.plqomq:O0zM
http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/29/forget-apps-now-the-bots-take-over/
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