Why Developers Love Chatbots
I wrote my first bot a few months ago: It was a very simple chatbot in slack for fashion shopping; a proof-of-concept for my startup chatShopper. I finished the bot in only one day — from knowing nothing about slackbots, or chatbots in general, to writing a working one.
Since then I was infected by bots. I started developing chatbots for telegram and was even more impressed by the way it works. Finally I organised a hackathon for chatbots and heard one comment from the participants multiple times:
“It’s so easy, because you don’t need to care about the user-interface.”
That’s also the reason why me and the other developers got a fully working chatbot in such a short amount of time.
Let’s take telegram for example: You register your bot at telegram (very nice that you do that by chatting to a bot called “bot father”), you get an API-token to access your bot and can start programming. You can write in any programming language you want; Javascript, Python, Go, etc. - whatever can handle web-requests.
Once you finished setting up your bot, you can get informed by telegram when a new message is coming in, handle the message on your server, and send back the response to your bot-user. Handling a message could be as easy as simple conditionals (if message is “hello”, reply “welcome to my bot”).
With only a few lines of code you have a working chatbot: Telegram handles the message-transfer-infrastructure with good APIs for you to work on, and gives you a nice, well tested and fully-working user-interface. You only decide what you want to send back to an incoming message. It’s just one function with an in-, and output.
You can also connect your chatbot with other APIs, like a weather-service, to allow your users to check the forecast for their town via a chatbots. And its just as easy as connecting lego building blocks; and the most important part, you can do what you want to do as a developer: writing good code with nice program logic.
And chatbots for slack and telegram as we know them now are just the beginning. Telegram and the kik messenger are continuously working on new features for chatbots beyond normal texting. They also support custom keyboards to make it more easy and faster for the user to interact with the bot.
At the moment, more and more developers are starting to work on chatbots and conversation-based AIs and new communities around this topic are coming up nearly every day. Soon chatbots will be more mainstream, if the rumours of facebook messenger introducing their chat SDK with a bot-store at their F8-conference in April are true.
If you are a developer and haven’t taken a look into this new world of chatbots yet; you should do it right now. Chatbots will be the future! #botLove
