In this article, I will summarize information taken from another article about social bots. The main topics which will be described are: what are bots, idea, purpose, usage, future and current state.

Definition and idea

Bots are automated programs which could be more effective than humans in specific tasks. Bots could run on different platforms and their main field of usage is social networks and communication software. The main idea of creating bots is to automate some processes and reduce the cost of human resources.

Purpose for businesses

Using bots business could provide their services without including a real person. Some special bots, like Microsoft Cortana, could gather user information and use it to increase advertisement conversion and sales.

Usage for customers

As for users, it would be more comfortable to perform some usual actions, such as booking hotel Room or food ordering, without wasting time for writing an email or calls to a company. Moreover, bots could give their advice depending on a current user conversation topic, for example in Skype.

Future and current state

Spreading bots, in the end, will make them a usual part of people lives and possibly will bring significant changes in interactions between programs and users. But now bots are more similar to smart search engines, which could give basic answers and services. What could be really influencing is a rise of AI usage.

The Tay bot experiment

Using an artificial intelligence Microsoft created a bot for Twitter, which can learn during interactions with people. This was an experiment and it turned to a wrong way. The bot Tay learned from people how to be rude and nationalistic and in result the bot was deactivated. From this experiment we can see, that bots event with AI still need further adjustments to be useful.

 

Thank you for reading! This article was written for learning purposes because I’m attending English lessons.