When we’ve got our noses poked into smartphones for hours each day, it’s hard to believe that apps are starting to hit the end of the road. Yet studies consistently show that smartphone users have condensed their daily screentime time into just a handful of favourite apps, often a browser, a couple of chat and social apps and maybe a game or two.
With dwindling opportunities to make money from mobile apps, some developers are now looking to chat bots as another route to making mobile software that people might actually use, and one day even pay for.
There are thousands of chat bots on Telegram, a two-and-a-half-year-old messaging app headquartered in Berlin with 100 million active users. The chat bots are free to use, and you can chat to them by simply sending them a message, as if they were a human user.
There’s a TriviaBot for answering trivia questions, a Random Reddit Fun bot which pulls GIFs and images from the /funny subreddit on the popular sharing site, or HangBot, a hangman-style game.
Publishers are exploring ways to use bots as a means to reach readers too. Today FORBES launched its experimental Forbesbot on Telegram, which pings users with news stories or runs a search. All of these bots work through the same chat interface you’d use to talk with a friend, but with a few tweaks to make them more user friendly.
