Some jobs are better left to the robots: Hence, Australia’s First Ever Bot-athon

There’s a sentiment that automation and technology are detrimental for society and progress. It couldn’t be farther from the truth.

When smart technologist apply artificial intellegance to the concept of a ‘robot’ or ‘bot’ you get what we now know as a ‘chatbot’. The chatbots of today aren’t perfect but they are leauges above the teleprompt automation of yesteryear. We’ve all yelled at a call centre directory at some point in our lives. The chatbots of today are more like talking to a friend on Facebook who really gets you and just happens to be helping you buy something.

Chatbots these days are focused on repetitive or frequent similar conversations that businesses or services have with their markets. They can be used for things like interacting with a cartoon character on Facebook or ordering flowers. Theoretically most common, simple interactions with people or information can be ‘bot’-ified. So we’d love to see what people can do with this in a weekend.

Barely two weeks ago an ambitious engineer from the budding northern Tasmanian startup community told us he wanted to bring VentureBeat’s Botathon to Australia. Our response, “That’s awesome! How can we help?” With a lot of hustle and a bit of creativity, Peter managed to throw together Australia’s first ever Botathon. It might not be big but it sure is mighty, much like the technology we’re dabbling with here.

Hackers showed up this morning, pitched their ideas quickly, assembled into teams and got to work. The ideas range from mental health support to financial saving, to appointment finders to playground suggestions. With groups ranging from four people all the way down to one man operations, there’s no doubt these talented, dedicated bot-thusiasts are going to come up with some interesting applications of this technology.

Pitches are on at 5pm tomorrow. The winner here will go onto compete with the North American winners for the final grand prize. It will be interesting to see how the ideas born of this weekend stand up against our bot-fellows in the other hemisphere. Is the goal to make businesses and services faster, more customer responsive and ultimately deliver more value…or are we just trying to create a future where most mundane desk jobs are obsolete?

We’ll do an update tomorrow to keep you posted. You can check out the initial pitches on their Facebook Page. Let us know if you’ve created an interesting bot.