Close on the heels of Microsoft and Facebook announcing their plans to develop bots, Gupshup, a leading messaging channel, announced the launch of its bot-development platform here on Tuesday.
Bot is a software that has been programmed to give responses to queries. With the increasing popularity of messaging apps, many companies are exploring the possibility of developing bots for messaging platforms.
“Virtually everything that we do on websites today can be done using bots,” said Beerud Sheth, founder and CEO of Gupshup. “We will be able shop, order food, book tickets for a movie, do financial transactions etc right from within the messaging app,” he said.
It’s loosely similar to personal assistants like Google Now, Siri or Cortana, that give you answers to the questions you ask them. But much more than that: users key in messages to get things done.
Mr. Sheth said the emerging bot revolution is the fourth paradigm shift. In the mid-80s, there was the desktop and clients; in the mid-90s, it was the browsers and websites; then in the mid-2000s, it was the mobile operating systems and apps. And now it’s messaging channel and bots. Just as companies now have websites, soon they will have bots, he said.
Developers can now use the tools available on “gupshup.io” platform, to create bots for companies or individuals. The omni-channel APIs will allow connectivity to messaging channels like SMS, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram and Teamchat, said Mr Sheth. The platform will allow developers to not only build, test and deploy a bots across many channels in minutes, it will also help them to monitor and track the bots.
With messaging apps recently opening up their APIs for businesses to build bots, Mr Sheth said India is now ideally placed for the revolution to take off. “One, we have a good developer ecosystem and two, we have a population that is already on the messaging platform.”
Stating that bots are the new apps, he said they make it much simpler for users to engage with businesses by just chatting with them.
