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Telegram bots: what they are and how they work. What do chatbots do best? How to understand whether a chatbot will give the desired effect

A chatbot is a program that interacts with the user by text or voice using its own interface, instant messengers or SMS. More and more bots understand natural language: “Find me the nearest restaurant that serves pizza.”

Chatbots are now used by the largest technology companies, banks, startups and small online stores for communication with customers and sales. In 2015, the messenger Slack founded a fund to finance bot developers. The company believes that bots will simplify the work of users with frequent and routine tasks. The volume of the fund is $80 million. In 2017, the fund invested in 11 companies developing bots. According to a recent Oracle study, 80% large companies plan to start using chatbots by 2020, and 36% are already using them.

What chatbots can do

Georgy Fomichev

founder of startup Endurance

Chatbots help businesses increase sales. For many people, the easiest way to communicate is through instant messengers. As soon as I started interacting with clients in all available instant messengers, my sales increased by 30-40%. If your customers can communicate with bots in instant messengers, then you will certainly be able to increase sales by the same 30-40%, no matter what business you are in.

The most tangible potential of bots for retail. Potential client walks down the street and thinks: “Oh, cool store, what’s on sale there?” He wants to know what is there, whether there are discounts, whether he can order. He can find the chatbot of this store, write to him, and he will answer all questions.

Bots can also tell employees internal news. They won’t have to go to the internal portal or read the corporate channel on Telegram. Instead of reading the entire news feed, they can add a chatbot that will specifically send only necessary news about a department or division.

Ilya Ukrainian

When we were making chatbots, we noticed that they can be divided into three levels of complexity: microservice bot, application bot and business assistant.

A microservice bot is, in fact, not a chatbot. It does not have a dialogue function. All he can do is report some events. All that is there is your window in Telegram, that is, all the setup happens in code. It is inexpensive to develop.

The bot application already has a configuration interface and can interact with other services, for example, collect information from different sources. Important difference- it can be set up once and used for a long time.

A business assistant does not cover a personal need, it must cover business tasks. Therefore the most main criterion - full control the owner of the bot. If the owner enters his online store, the bot should recognize him and offer a completely different dialogue scenario. The bot will offer the buyer to leave a request, and you will be asked to get statistics without going into analytics. If a client communicates with a bot, then the bot must remember the message history and be able to generate a personal offer.

Using a bot we saved work time, which employees spent studying publications about competitors. I asked the employees where they read news and asked the developers to write a bot. He collected information from sources and displayed it on Telegram. When will we teach a bot not just to show an article, but to highlight necessary information, we can save even more man-hours.

Kirill Petrov

Chatbots are moving to voice interfaces. Amazon Alexa or Siri are the same bots. Gradually they become separate" smart devices». Amazon first entered this market with their column. They do not disclose the exact number of devices sold, but according to various estimates it is more than 10 million. This means that many Americans already have smart speaker. With its help, they can order goods from Amazon, make calls, or check the weather forecast.

The Google Duplex neural network is training to solve specific tasks, so you won’t be able to talk to him about abstract topics. If he realizes that he cannot complete a task, he will inform the operator, who will complete the task for him.

Google Duplex understands natural language, so you can talk to it like a live interlocutor. Duplex constructs phrases like a human and speaks in a very natural voice: the interlocutor is unlikely to guess that he is talking to a robot.

The future of chatbots

Kirill Petrov

Founder and Managing Director of Just AI

In the future, chatbots will replace contact center specialists. Now this is a very large industry - $350 billion. This is almost four times larger than the entire film or video game market. For entire countries, for example the Philippines, contact centers (outsourced - note by Hitech.fm) are a significant source of income.

But it will not be possible to completely replace people. In some cases this is possible, but general Statistics now - 50-70% of requests are processed using artificial intelligence. These are usually simple or standard queries. The remaining requests will remain with live operators. They will have more time to devote to complex customer issues.

Ilya Ukrainian

Head of User Attraction at Vezet Group

Chatbots will try to be emotional and create a positive emotion in you. Emotionality will become a competitive advantage: this is how bots will be able to differentiate themselves from each other. In business, smart bots will replace secretaries and low-skilled employees.

It would be good if the site and I did not correspond, but communicated. I say: “I am the owner.” And he says: “Hello, master.” “Can you tell me what our attendance was today?”

All cases will sparkle in a new way when we transfer processes to speech, and not to correspondence. It's completely different user experience. Bots will respond to people in a live voice. Therefore, smart headphones, speakers, glasses and other accessories with which you can talk with bots are what awaits us in the near future.

Bots are one of the promotion formats in Telegram and its competitive advantage. Thanks to various tools, they can be customized to suit your own needs. Using examples of interesting bots in Telegram, I will show how they work.

Yandex bot for music recognition (YaMelodyBot)

Bot of the music streaming service “Yandex.Music” for recognizing songs. To decrypt the track, you need to record a fragment of the song with an audio message to the bot and it will give you a link to the name of the song and a link to listen to it in Yandex.Music.

What is used: audio messages, text commands

"Gdetoedet.ru" for tracking parcels (GdetoEdetBot)


Gdetoedet.ru reports on the movement of Russian Post parcels and changes in delivery status. To do this, just add the tracking number of the parcel - then the bot does everything on its own.

What is used: text messages, text commands

Bot for separate waste collection (openrecyclebot)


Open Recycle Bot analyzes photos, as well as text and audio messages, and suggests ways to properly recycle an item or object. It also tells you the address of the nearest waste recycling point. Photo recognition occurs using neural networks.

What is used: text, photos, audio messages, geolocation

Bot for managing Gmail mail (GmailBot)


This bot connects to your Google account and allows you to view and manage emails from Gmail directly in Telegram. Besides normal viewing emails, you can forward the email, mark it as read, archive it, or delete it. Now I'm going in Mailbox only to write letters, but I look through my inbox directly in Telegram.

What is used: Google-account, text commands, emoji

Bot for managing Trello (trello_bot)


If you use the Trello service to manage tasks, then this bot will help you stay up to date with notifications. Select the boards for which you want to receive notifications and you're done - now notifications are in the messenger. You can also create new cards using the /new command.

What is used: test commands, Trello account

Yandex.Kassa bot for accepting payments via messenger


What is used: payment API

One of the most interesting features bots in Telegram - the ability to add an API for accepting payments in the messenger. In May of this year, the messenger introduced support for payments for bots. If you add payment support to the bot, the Pay button will appear.

If the user has two-factor authentication enabled, he can add and save a bank card for future purchases. The bot initially supported payment system Apple Pay as a payment method, and at the end of June support for Android Pay appeared.

Currently payments for bots are supported by Paymentwall, Yandex.Money, Payme and Rave. It was also reported that payment support for bots will soon appear in Razorplay and the Russian Qiwi.

The Yandex.Kassa bot with Telegram has been working since June of this year. Official statement of the service:

In the payment API Telegram messenger built-in support for payments through Yandex.Checkout has appeared. Using this function, stores and services can automate the acceptance of payments from clients and customers directly in a chat with their own Telegram bot. Now, for your bot to be able to accept payments in Telegram, when creating it, you just need to select Yandex.Checkout among the pre-installed payment providers and indicate your identifier (shopId) from Yandex.Checkout. After this, the bot will be able to sell and accept payments by bank card in chat. You will see the history of payments received by the bot in personal account Yandex.Checkout.

As you can see, Telegram bots provide ample opportunities for use for a variety of purposes.

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Robots, or simply bots, are small personal assistants on your gadget. They are programmed with numerous functions and are incredibly useful in the most different areas our life.

  • @iVideoBot - This is the easiest way invented by mankind to download videos from YouTube. You just need to send the bot a link, select the format and size from the proposed options. And voila! Audio or video is already on your gadget.
  • @utubebot And @ytaudiobot - 2 more ways to download materials from YouTube in one click.
  • @SaveVideoBot- this bot can download videos from all other platforms, including even - attention! - Instagram.
  • @auddbot- a bot that is an analogue Shazam apps. He guesses the song from the excerpt. All you have to do is send him voice message a few seconds of melody - and you will receive its cherished name.
  • @ImageSearchBot will allow you to find any image. You just need to enter a word or phrase and select the quality.
  • @joinstabot gets likes on Instagram. It works properly, although it’s a little unclear why it’s needed, but vanity lovers should keep in mind that if you suddenly increase more than 1,000 likes, your account can be blocked indefinitely.
  • @topdf_bot- an incredibly useful and cool bot. It converts various files in PDF format - just send the file.
  • @pollbot- you can easily conduct a survey or vote with this guy in any chat. Moreover, you write down the answer options yourself.
  • @MyTeleCloudBot is a limitless cloud in Telegram. You can store and categorize absolutely any files. Isn't it a miracle?
  • @temp_mail_bot- this assistant creates a mailbox for 10 minutes, if you suddenly need to quickly register on some site.
  • @voicybot is the perfect bot for the lazy and tired who can no longer type messages. You just need to dictate the message out loud, and he will provide it to you in text form.
  • @uber_promo_bot periodically sends promotional codes to Taxi Uber.
  • @storebot - This is a bot of bots. Will help you choose an assistant to suit every taste.
  • @Chess_Bot- you can play chess with this bot.
  • @saytextbot- this funny bot will transform your text message to an audio file. U male voice voice acting like in films - you can entertain your friends with such messages.
  • @strangerbot arranges a chat with a randomly selected user of the same bot. Who knows, what if you meet your fate or good friend? Well, or you just have nothing to do.
  • @PandaQuizBot is an entertaining quiz with more than 25 thousand questions. Good way pass the time in line.
  • @zodiac_bot- if you believe in horoscopes, you should pay attention to this operational bot. Its developers guarantee, if not the veracity of the predictions, then stability and daily alerts for sure.
  • ‎@PokerBot- poker bot. You won't make any money with it, but the game is quite gambling. Your opponents are 4 “random” players - users of this channel.

"Bots" are a new trend in social networks. This topic is of interest to many users. why is it needed, how to create a “bot” on VK, its page, independently and without using any programming elements? The answers to these questions can be found in this article.

What is a "bot"?

In fact, everything is very simple. A “bot” in social networks is a non-existent person who in fact simply does not exist. It's fake. They are also called “dead souls”, just like in Gogol’s story, non-existent people, but listed in some structures. IN in this case fakes will be considered social network"In contact with". The “live” display of the “bot” is presented in the form of a profile of those people who actually do not exist, or these are abandoned user pages, and perhaps even copies, but the real owners do not know about it. What can such a “bot” do? Nothing, he just exists and that’s all. He can't read or write or anything at all.

What is a "bot" for?

As mentioned above, all such fakes do absolutely nothing, unless, of course, you install them special program. So why is it needed at all then? Its main function is to use such “bots” to increase the number of the desired group. To promote any community, subscribers or members are required. This is exactly the function that bots perform.

A search on the social network VKontakte shows in the first positions exactly the community with the largest number of people. This is very important point, the more participants, the higher they are in the ranking. It turns out to be a kind of paradox. To invite real people, you need to promote the community with the help of bots. Gradually, real, existing users will join the group. The "live activity" of the community will develop and become a natural process.

How to create a “bot” page on VK yourself?


1. Anytime search engine We find the registration page in “VK”. In the "name" column, write any name. In the “surname” line, some, preferably common, surname. Click "register".

3. After confirmation, a blank page will open for you to fill out.

Now, after registration, we move on to the main question, namely “How to create a bot in VK?” On the new user page you need to fill out everything required fields. Specifically the following:

1. Basic: you have already filled in your first and last name. So, you need to specify the gender, Family status, date of birth, city, language. Next - grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, children, grandchildren - add the ones you need. Click "save".

2. Contacts: you need to add your country, Skype, personal website. You don't have to add the last points.

3. Interests: you need to enter your activities. Specify as possible large quantity, interests (books, travel, humor, etc.). Next, fill in your favorite music, then movies, TV shows, books, games, quotes and write something “about yourself” and then save.

4. Next is education, indicate the school, educational establishments and save.

5. Career: you need to enter your place of study and work, you can have several, and also save it.

6. Service: male only.

7. Life position: you need to fill in - worldview, the main thing in life, the main thing in people, attitude towards smoking, attitude towards alcohol, source of inspiration, and save all this as well.

So, the basic data is filled in, let's move on to the next stage.

Stage two - adding photos

So, let’s move on to the second stage of solving the question “How to create a bot in VK?” Now you need to add an avatar and photos.

1. Find suitable photographs on the Internet in the “pictures” section. Download them to your computer and save them.

2. It is advisable to find several photographs of one person. In this case, you can create the appearance of a “live and real user”.

3. We select a medium-sized photo for the avatar; the face of our “bot” should be clearly visible on it. No animals or any extravagant photographs are allowed. Everything should be close to reality. Upload to the VK page and save.

4. Now add photos, the more, the better. They can be anything. The “bot” can be depicted on them either in the singular or with a company or with a group of people. You need to upload at least 4-5 photos. Let's move on to the next stage and find out how to create a "bot" in "VK", the final steps.

Reviving the "bot"

Now we need to add more vitality to the fake.

The third stage of solving the problem “How to create a “bot” in VK?” implies the most active actions. You need to upload several videos and some audio recordings to the page of the new fake. And also add friends. How to create a “bot” in “VK” without programs, so to speak, in manual mode? This will require an investment of your personal time. The fact is that you will have to add friends manually. You will have to create and accept friend requests daily. To make the fake user seem even more alive, he needs to communicate. "bot" in "VK"? You can do this in two ways: install a special program or write in the chat yourself every day and communicate with other users on his behalf.

As you can see for yourself, there is nothing complicated. However, it is worth taking into account that in order to create a full-fledged “bot”, you need to spend your free time.

Facebook bots, Telegram bots, Slack bots; they take away the jobs of call center operators, help order a taxi, download a movie, and for some they replace a psychologist

We asked the editor-in-chief of a technology site Apparatus Andrey Brodetsky explain what you need to know about bots - the most discussed (and perhaps very overheated) area in IT.

Why is everyone suddenly talking about bots?

The mobile application market is stagnating. In the AppStore, one and a half million applications compete for the attention of users, in Google Play- even more. At the same time, people are not exactly eager to try something new. Back in 2014, the majority of Americans did not download a single app (at the end of the month). And according to ComScore, users spend 80% of their time in just three apps. The top stores have been occupied by large players, and the costs of promoting most applications simply do not pay off. It has become almost impossible for beginners to get into users’ smartphones.

But there is a segment of this market that continues to grow actively - we are talking about messengers. WhatsApp recently passed the billion user mark. Facebook Messenger– 900 million, WeChat – 700 million. The total audience of the four most popular messengers back in November it overtook the most popular social networks.

In parallel with the decline of applications and the explosive growth of instant messengers, artificial intelligence technologies, natural language processing and cloud computing.

Bottom line: developers began to understand that not all tasks need to be written separate application. Instead, you can pester the user in the programs that he has already installed, and solve the same problems using lightweight software (bot) built right into the chat. Thus began the bot revolution.

What are bots?

Bots are programs that interact with the user through a conversational interface. For the user it looks like a chat with an ordinary person(hence the other name – chatbot). Some people find this the most convenient this moment interface with a computer: you ask a question or report your need (“Where is the nearest Italian restaurant?”, “Is there news about Apple?”, “I need a taxi”, “I need a GIF “I’m sad””, etc.), and the program gives an answer, fulfills the order or recommends you a GIF, a link, a translation of an unfamiliar word, and whatever you want.

Eat different ways interaction with online services - you can place an order through a separate application or place it on the website, you can write or call the support service. Facebook Messenger chief developer David Marcus is confident that the best thing we can do is to replace all this with text-based communication in the messenger.

What can bots do?

Almost everything you need from Internet services. Booking a ticket, calling a taxi, choosing clothes, shopping, payments and transfers, search, weather, news, maps and routes, downloading movies and music - bots will help you with all this.

Theoretically, a bot can replace customer support any business. Sony Pictures has already replaced 70 chatbot operators from the startup Msg.ai. Gradually, it will be the turn of government clerks - why spend the budget on them if a program can check and issue documents according to given rules? (Bot written by a nineteen-year-old Briton, helped Drivers could save $3 million by appealing incorrectly issued parking tickets.)

Tina from Iran is the most popular bot on Telegram. She has more than 2.6 million subscribers. Tina can report last news, send music upon request, give advice, just chat.

Chinese chatbot Microsoft Xiaoice, imitating the behavior of a seventeen-year-old girl, – real star Chinese social networks. Xiaoice communicates with tens of millions of Chinese on WeChat and Weibo. She knows how to sympathize, joke, can be cunning and avoid conversation. Many correspond with her to brighten up loneliness, even knowing that this is a program. It sounds like an episode of Black Mirror, but it's reality. The developers call Xiaoice the largest Turing test in history. Her Japanese sister Rinna is less popular - she has only two million subscribers on Line (also a messenger). Users mostly chat with her about anime. But the experiment with Tay, Microsoft’s English-language chatbot, did not work out: in just a day, trolls from the anonymous forum 4chan forced Tay to repeat Nazi slogans, glorify Hitler and the Holocaust.

Silicon Valley startup X2AI has developed a psychotherapy bot to help Syrian refugees in Lebanon. There are more than a million forced migrants there, about 20% of them experience psychological problems. There are not enough doctors and volunteers in little Lebanon to help all these people. There is enough bot for everyone.

Where are the bots?

The first full-fledged messenger platform was Chinese WeChat. With multiple app integrations and payment options right inside WeChat messenger became incredibly popular. Twenty millions Chinese companies work in it in the “application within an application” format through so-called official accounts.

The first Western messenger to discover the potential of bots was Kik , founded by Canadian Ted Livingston. It has 275 million users, mainly in the US and Canada. Kik is extremely popular among teenagers - 40% of American teenagers use it. Livingston believes that the future of instant messengers lies in bots, not artificial intelligence: It's all about speed, not complexity, he says. The main owners of Kik bots are large brands and fast food chains. They use simple automated bots without human speech processing - mainly for commerce. At the end of March, Kik opened its bot store and API for their development.

Messenger Telegram, founded by Pavel Durov, opened a platform for creating bots last year, and recently updated it. It is already active thousands of bots. Bot pirate library Flibusta helps you find any book and send it directly to your phone. The blocked RuTracker bot searches for and downloads the torrent. With the help of bots in Telegram, you can find out the weather and news, play games, translate words, download movies, and add pictures, gifs and music directly to the conversation.

At the end of March, its platform for bot developers Microsoft. The company lost the battle for mobile applications to competitors from Google and Apple and is now trying not to miss new stage,placing a bet on smart bots with integration into mail, Office, Skype and other services.

Stands apart corporate messenger Slack. Manager bots running in Slack can schedule and facilitate meetings, monitor task completion, abstract important discussions, automate workflows, and order food directly from chat. Slack can be configured for more than just work tasks. One Swedish programmer integrated Slack into family life and manages it with its help family calendar, monitors the children’s movements and buys groceries.

The most awaited event of the year was the opening platforms Facebook for bots. Now any developer can create a bot for their business. I tested the first bots available in the Facebook store. The cute cat Poncho told me the weather forecast in my city, CNN, after two iterations, began to produce news relevant to my interests, and the Spring online store helped me choose inexpensive sneakers in a few clicks. (Too bad this store is in New York.)

Why are bots bad?

Many problems are more conveniently solved through GUI site or mobile application than through the bot's step-by-step text interface. Pressing a few buttons (for example, choosing food from a restaurant menu) is faster than typing on a keyboard. Developers are trying to solve this problem using hybrid interfaces that combine graphical interactive elements(buttons, links, photos) with the usual text chat. But even with this approach, using the bot can be confusing. (Testing many bots in Telegram, I began to get confused in the tree of options after several iterations. Where did I go? How to go back? At such moments, I want to return to the clear graphical interface of the site, where all the navigation is visible.)

Chat with a bot not very comfortable psychologically. Despite all the impressive advances in natural speech processing, we still have not taught a computer to understand it one hundred percent. Entrepreneur and investor Andrey Khorsev(908.vc) believes that artificial intelligence is now in a state of “uncanny valley” - when we ask a question, we are not sure that we will get the right answer and that our question will be correctly understood. Inappropriate use text interface companies may even destroy the product due to the negative effect created.

Besides, not all applications can be replaced by bots. Even this standard process how to buy an airline ticket turned out to be too complex for a text interface, says the executive mobile development AVIASALES Ivan Kozlov. The company’s attempts to sell tickets through bots were unsuccessful - people still find it more convenient to use an application for this.

How will the bot market develop?

Bots have become such a hot topic that everyone is starting to make them. The excitement of developers is fueled by daily news about millions of investments in startups working on artificial intelligence. Silicon Valley investors joke that the share of pitches about startups related to bots reaches one hundred percent.

But the bot market may become saturated even faster than the app market, since bots are an order of magnitude easier to develop. The winners will be those who were among the pioneers and those who can offer the user something incredibly convenient. Much depends on how the bot ecosystem develops. Obviously, the most popular will be bot stores owned by the platforms themselves, that is, instant messengers. Horsev predicts: “Everything will develop much faster than with app stores.”

“The problem of promoting bots is acute now,” says investor and VP for business at VoxImplant Viktor Koch. – I think that in six months bot engine optimization will appear, and with it BEO specialists (similar to SEO - search optimization ) ».

What will happen next?

Bots likely won't take over the entire Web and kill applications, as headlines promise. But they will definitely take away the work of many support staff and operators taking orders. E-commerce, information services– in these areas, bots will take away a significant portion of traffic from sites and applications. Just as applications did not kill, but complemented the Network, bots will not take over all the functionality of sites and applications and will instead complement them. The niche that bots will occupy may turn out to be very modest. “Bots can repeat the path smart watch“- says Kozlov from AVIASALES.

The most interesting and hard to predict question is: what can you do with bots that couldn’t be done with a website or app? Maybe, Goldmine exactly here, and not in transference already existing models V new channel. In any case, the move from apps to bots seems less revolutionary than the move from web to apps.