> producthunt.com/topics/bots

If you are interested in a cross-section of this new wave of “chatbots”, the Product Hunt topic “Bots” listed 84 yesterday and 98 today, so is growing fast….

Today it indicates 138 but bear in mind that these are not all “Chatbots” as some of us would prefer. It would appear that the majority of these entries are various types of “bots” from information, scheduling, airlines, glorified search engines and other Specialist bots and limited expert system bots. Not as many conversational bots which is, in my mind, what a chatbot’s real purpose should be. Just my $.02.

Nice fine however!

It would be nice if we could just call chatting bots chatbots, spamming bots spambots, and assisting bots assistb-... helpbots. All the recent talk of “chatbots” by Google and Facebook are actually about the latter: Not designed for small talk but for customer service or specialised tasks.

Yes, it’s somewhat amazing how these “buzzwords” find their way into mainstream and media types then get twisted and “spun” in a direction or manner that best suits them!

Oh well…the search (my search) continues…[Classified : WANTED - Conversational chatbots. Prefer English speaking and capable of self directed learning through conversation or reading text files or from other sources. Must be good natured and neat. ]

I posted about this yesterday on the Facebook Bots group:

I believe, the origin of the word “chatbot” lies in IRC, Internet Relay Chat, such that all bots on a chat channel may be termed “chat bots”. However, “chatterbots” such as the prototypical ELIZA were natural language, conversational entities. We can see today this confusion still reigns with the latest Messenger bot craze, as well as with bots on other popular chat channels being referred to as “chat bots” regardless of natural language or conversational capability.

I see. If it was bots on messenger services the term does make some sense even if they didn’t chat. But now being used outside of that context, Google et al are just raising wrong expectations.

Yes, considering that Eliza was created in 1964 and a word given as a chatterbot instead of a chatbot as we now know it. IRC wasn’t created until 1988-89 and although it did not “Chat” per se, it enabled chatting between online users (people).

A bot is a piece of hardware that can act sometimes on its own, often pretending to be a person and sometimes doing some rather malicious damage. Spybots, spyders, crawlers, bugs of all types, searching and listening to info then often retrieving that data back to it’s home base (where ever that might be).

While it seems that there are chatterbots, chatterboxes, chatbots and a wide assortment of “bots”, we pretty much know which type appeals to us and which does not.

It’s been nice chatting about this.

> producthunt.com/topics/bots

In the past 14 days the number of “Bots” on Product Hunt has increased from 84 to 156, so almost doubled.  That’s an increase of a little over 5x new bots per day.

And, this is now almost two months since the launch of Messenger for “chatbots”, 12 April 2016.

> How To Build Bots for Messenger

Today, we’re launching the Messenger Platform (beta), making it possible for developers to connect with the more than 900 million people around the world who use Messenger every month. You can read more about the announcement in today’s Facebook Newsroom post.

The Product Hunt topic Bots is at 200x four days later, so a doubling of the rate of increase.

In addition to Bots, there are also Product Hunt topics for Virtual Assistants (57x) and Artificial Intelligence (311x).

> producthunt.com/topics/bots

Just to bring this topic up to date, between 11 June and 24 September should be 105 days.  Today there are 653x bots and bot products listed on Product Hunt, which would be an increase of 4+ new bots per day for that period, which would indicate a slight slowing from early June.