How bots work for computers and smartphones?

Increasingly popular and increasingly "smart", bots are becoming a fixed presence in our online life. But one must be careful not to deal with it.

In the IT field, bot (an abbreviation of robots) is software that, by accessing the network using the same channels used by flesh and blood users, is able to perform the most varied tasks in a completely autonomous way. All about, as we will see shortly, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

This ability has meant that, especially in the last 3 years, bot store have multiplied and so have their functionality and applications. A trend that ended up creating confusion among users, even the most experienced. Because, as mentioned above, the bot store world is quite large: there are botnet bots, used for DDoS attacks and spam; there are conversation chatbot, used by instant messaging services to automate a certain type of communication (dissemination of news, for example, or customer support); then there are the "social" bots, etc.

How bots work?

When we talk about conversational bots, today we are referring to real artificial intelligence algorithms able to analyze and understand - in a more or less exact way - the language of flesh users who interact with them. Skills that improve incrementally thanks to machine learning: bots are able to learn from their mistakes and, above all, from their interaction with real people. This allows them to improve their human language analysis skills and thus provide increasingly punctual and exact answers.

Technical bots

At the moment, this is the most widespread and least-known type of bot store for users. Also because, after all, they act a little "in the shadows". Within this category, just to give an example, we include web crawlers or web spiders, the software used by search engines to analyze the Net, save websites and create indexes which then allow us to return SERPs appropriate to our intentions of research.

The world of technical bots, however, is much wider than you can imagine: so-called wiki bots also fall into this area, software that has the task of automating the management of wiki projects (such as Wikipedia, for example) by checking if the links (internal and external) are correct and functioning, automatically updating the contents or even creating new pages and new entries of the free encyclopaedia.

Chatbots

In the beginning, there was Telegram, an instant messaging application known as very helpful. From there the "fashion" of the chatbot exploded quickly until it landed on more well-known applications, such as Facebook Messenger for example. But exactly what are conversation chatbots? These are software which, by exploiting artificial intelligence and machine learning, are able to simulate the responsiveness of a person in flesh and blood, and therefore simulate a conversation with a user who should consult them. Initially very basic - chatbot responses were predefined and standardized - today their language analysis skills and their ability to formulate increasingly complex answers are growing very fast. This allowed developers, software houses and companies providing services to create "chat" robots capable of performing the most varied tasks:

Social bots

Bots have now become a permanent presence even within social networks in the form of fake profiles. It does not take much, in fact, to create applications capable of creating dozens of accounts that can then be used for various purposes. There are those who use them, for example, to inflate the number of followers on Twitter and Instagram and make people believe that they are more famous than they actually are.

It is therefore of fundamental importance if you do not want to lose pace compared to the competition, to introduce these new communication systems in your company. Whether it is small, family-run, or a more structured and already established business, Bot Store allows you to innovate and reach the right customers for your target.

I have been writing for the last 2 years. My passion for helping people in all aspects of Artificial intelligence flows through my articles, I love to read and try new.