What’s the difference between a Bot and an Agent?
“Bots” are things you hear talked about a lot nowadays, but you almost never hear the term “agent” anymore.
Once the glamerous star of the AI circuit, Agents recently have been relegated to searching for info, keeping track of birthdays and calculating your taxes.
So I thought it would be useful to write up — how I see the difference between Bots and Agents — and what we can expect in the future.
Front-end — what the user interacts with
Bots are what a user interacts with an on on-going basis. We call that the “front-end” of a software design. Bots are built into a Messaging App interface and “typed at” by users, usually telling the Bot what city you wanna fly to or what time you wanna fly.
Bots are the way we order our pizzas, buy our shoes and find new lovers. In other words — Bots are the new Apps. But that’s for another article to rant about.
A majority of the time the user doesn’t even type into their Bot. They’re clicking on buttons, selecting time or dates (from pre-built selectors) and utilizing (what are called) “conversational interfaces.”
Bots are accessed via Messaging platforms (like Facebook Messenger or Kik) and can be accessed simply by tapping on the name of the Bot — in your list of messaging conversations.
Pretty dam easy to access.
Back-end — where all the work occurs
Agents are headless, do NOT have a single place to access or edit them and in general — work tirelessly, 24/7 on your behalf — doing your bidding.
Agents are all about the back-end tasks that need to be accomplished and the whole notion of “programming your Agent” to do what you want it to do — is different for each Agent based systems.
The first time I ever heard of Agents was with a company called “General Magic.” And boy oh boy did they talk about Agents.
They got really got at capturing our imagination, seeding our brainstorming sessions and claiming the high ground (and land grab) around the field of Agent based systems.
Needless to say — that didn’t work out very well.
So perhaps one of the reasons why we don’t hear about Agents nowadays — is that they failed. And nobody wants to be associated with failed technology.
So now they’re called Bots.
I could dive into technical details, AI assumptions and all sorts of futurisic navel gazing, crystal ball shamanism — but at the end of the deay — its what commercial products and systems DO out in the marketplace — that count.
Facebook Messenger Bots offer zero “agent” based anything.
Agents are a ripe term and function to be grabbed onto — by some VC funded something or other. Cause unless you have VC funding, there’s no WAY you can build an Agent based system yourself. Right?
