What is a bot?

• A bot is an application that performs an automated task, such as setting an alarm, telling you the weather or searching online.
• Bots are often associated with sites like Twitter, but there are many other types.
• Andre Gray invented the world’s very first Internet bot named “inkling” —a crawler bot.
• Today, Internet bots are extremely crucial to the creation and functionality of the web and search engines.They make up to 65% of all Internet activity.

What can bots do?

• Bots perform simple, structurally repetitive tasks much more quickly, efficiently, and accurately than is humanly possible.
• It can help order food, shop for clothes, save money and find restaurants.
• Many bots are programmed to act like humans and so when one talks to them, it feels like asking a person for help instead of just typing in a search engine.
• For example, the Hi Poncho chatbot available in Facebook Messenger tells the weather around us.
• A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate human conversation.

How smart are these bots?

• While artificial intelligence keeps getting better, there is still long way to go and make bots like Siri or Cortana more effective.
• Presently, these bots cannot respond for anything which is not been simulated. Chatbots aren't doing too much better either.

Where can one find bots?

• It can be found on many messaging apps, including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Kik, and Telegram.
• Twitter has bots which will reply to anyone, but usually not offer any assistance.

Are bots the future?

• Some developers and companies believe that people are tired of apps and would rather use bots.
• Instead of having many different apps in a phone, one could have single app with multiple bots that can help with different tasks.
• In future there will be smarter bots at home (like Amazon's Alexa), on our phones and in our car that will help automate our lives.