THE BOTS HAVE ARRIVED
By S Preet Kaur
What are bots ?
In world of automation, bots hold a huge significance. They are programmed and designed to carry simple tasks with less human intervention. Though bot is also short form of robot , we will discuss internet bots in this write up. Bots are made up of set of algorithms. These can include mimicking behaviours , conversation, understanding patterns, detecting, gathering content and replicating.
The bots help in saving time, doing routine task, increase efficiency and decrease burden and exclude bias that can creep in. A bot is a programmed software application that runs programmed tasks. The bots are automated.
KINDS OF BOTS
Chatbots: These include conversations with a real person. Recent examples of chatbots include virtual assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri and Google Assistant. Do you remember that time when your food order was late and you lodged complaint online , chatted and chose answers from specific responses and options .
Social bots: These bots relate to discussions with users on social media platforms.These are hot topic these days with politics also in news.
Shopbots: These bring the best options for a customer online.
Knowbots: These collect knowledge for a user or customer by automatically visiting sites to retrieve information and data that meets certain categories.
Spiders or crawlers: These bots access and reach websites and gather material for indexes in search engines.
Web scraping crawlers: These are used for data harvesting and extracting relevant material and information from webpages.
Monitoring bots: These can be used to monitor the health of a website or system.
Transactional bots: These bots are designed to simplify tasks like blocking a credit card or confirming a bank's hours of operation.These are also replacemt of certain enquiries over phone.
Backlink Checker bots: These bots check the inbound URLs a website is getting so that marketers and SEO specialists can derive insights and optimize their site accordingly.
Download Bots: These are programmed to automatically download software or mobile applications.
Ticketing Bots: The bots are programmed to buy tickets to events.
Bots can also be classified as good bots or bad bots - bots that do not cause any harm against bots that might pose threats.
