Bot? Human? Cyborg? What is your bot?
Bots are all the rage now. With so many people making so many amazing bots, how do you classify these bots? After looking at a few, here’s a simple taxonomy I came up with.
Based on how they work, here’s how you classify them:
- Just Bots:
Simple, plain vanilla bots. These are the most common species of bots found in the wild. They process your sentences and give you back a programmed reply (or get confused and not reply at all). What a bot like this is capable of doing depends largely upon how it has been programmed. Such bots can be a great aid for customer service where a lot of the questions are recurring. Instead of having a real human service a request, recurring requests can go to the bot which then looks at its knowledge base to come up with a reply. The questions it has no answers for go to humans so that answers to these can be programmed later. The user cannot, directly, speak to a human.
2. Human-Assisted Bots:
These are humans in disguise. These are the bots where, behind the scenes, humans look at your sentences and decide how to process them. Bots like these can make great virtual assistants as they combine the conversational UI with the power of human mind. Such bots are useful for the education domain where questions are answered by experts. The student, like me, could say: “What is the Laplace of cos^2t+e^(1+2x)”. Bots like these can leverage machine learning algorithms to send each message to the right expert.
3. Cyborgs:
Think of this as a mix between a simple bot and a human-assisted bot. Such a bot allows the user to speak to the bot or to the owner of the bot, perhaps by prefixing something to the message that helps in differentiating the intended recipient. For example, “Hi! Please tell me my past orders” could be processed by the bot which replies with all the past orders of the user and “@Human item X is out of stock. Could you please tell me when it will be restocked?” could go to the owner of the bot. The owner’s reply would come back in the same conversation. Such bots are great for small businesses that do not have the necessary staff to service all the queries of their customers. Using a bot would help them connect with their customers better by only answering important questions that need swift responses.
4. God Bots:
When you have one bot that controls an army of other bots, that controller bot becomes a god bot. The user has the ability to speak to one of the many bots in a single conversation. “@Bot1 how are you?” goes to Bot1, as you might have guessed, and “@GodBot hi!” goes to the god bot. From a business viewpoint, this is a great approach for aggregating various services. From a more practical standpoint, such bots can be used like so:
@CabBot book me a cab from X to Y.
@FoodBot order me a pizza. pepperoni. medium. extra cheese.
@GodBot what other bots can I speak to?
Not only do these bots aggregate services, they also provide a really streamlined conversation to the user. Instead of having to switch between various bots to keep track of various things, there is a single place a user can now go to. So, the user can do something like this:
@FoodBot why isn’t my pizza here yet?
5. and finally, The Terminator
The ultimate, all-capable bot that can ride motorbikes. Very intelligent. Has abilities to punch holes in the wall.
This is just a simple classification I came up with. I am sure there are more ways to classify bots. Found a classification that was not listed? Then maybe this article was written by a simple bot that was not programmed properly. Mention it in the comments :D
