Whether it’s due to science fiction, or simple misunderstanding, there are a lot of misconceptions about software bots. Use of the term ‘bot’ is broad, and this only serves to confuse matters further. In this article we are going to focus on software bots so forget about Boston Dynamics for a moment.
So, what are software bots? Here, we answer the questions around these useful software programs and clear up the uncertainty that clouds them. A bot is a program that automates daily activities for an organization. Typically, these tasks are simple, repetitive and routine. Some use artificial intelligence and other data-driven technologies to make decisons and solve complex problems. All bots are not necessarily ‘smart’ hence marchine learning and artificial intelligence is not a requirement.
Creating a chatbot
One of of the common bots is Chatbot , that engages visitors/users in websites and mobile applications. This has evolved from embedded chats to social media chatbots. The latter can engage you through platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook, Telegram and others. It could be a mobile number or a username connected to the social network through a webhook. When a user engages the bot, the conversation thread data is instantly ‘dumped’ into the webhook(usually in Javascript Object Notation(JSON) format). With decoded JSON object, you can process the user’s response according to the business logic . Play with it as much as your creativity can do and respond back accordingly. For instance, you can authenticate and check user’s balance( assuming it’s your bank’s chatbot) etc . This can be applied in banking, ecommerce and generally in all industries.
Depending on complexity of your model/logic, it coul take you a day or several weeks/months to develop and test. Once the logic works perfectly in one platform like Facebook, it can be copied and pasted for the rest. What changes is just the endpoints and other few parameters. It takes 1 to 3 minutes to create a Telegram bot and few weeks or even months to create one for Whatsapp or Facebook. It takes longer on Facebook due to their vigorous verification process. It’s not possible to create such bots on Twitter due to Twitter’s automation policies.
Recent project
Recently, I developed a chatbot prototype for Kenya Airway’s Fahari Innovation Challenge. It communicates with Kenya Airways customers via social media platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook and Telegram. A customer simply sends a message to engage the bot . The bot can respond to enquiries, can book a flight,can initiate,accept/reject and process payments(M-PESA,EQUITEL,PAYPAL AND DEBIT/CREDIT CARDS), can generate and send receipts/invoices to customers,can check flight status/timetable,can receive,process and escalate customer complains/feedback among other roles.The bot is very FAST and ACCURATE as compared to it’s customer care personnel counterparts .
It has the capacity to handle/manage as high as 50,000 customers in seconds at a time, hence it will reduce their workload. This kind of technology not only saves time but also plays a very significant role in organisation’s data security. There’s 100% data processing/exchange abstraction between the bot and Kenya Airways servers hence making it impossible for hackers to intercept, unlike the usual way of data exchange between KQ web pages/app and servers whereby hackers can easily tap into the app’s endpoints.
