It’s clear that bots are having a moment. Even before Facebook’s Bots for Messenger announcement at their developer conference, there had already been a flood of investments, controversies, and critiques. So I wanted to learn how to make my own bot — and put it to work!
On the one hand, chat bots are nothing new. They have been around since the 1960s and the days of ELIZA. But suddenly the tools to create meaningful, personalised conversations are easy enough to deploy at scale. We have APIs, the ability to continuously monitor and parse messages for relevance and enormous messaging platforms for distribution — which is where people are spending the majority of time these days.
To get a sense for the bot world I decided to try my hand at making one.