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Bloomberg
Some of the world’s largest technology companies are banking on a future where people will send text messages to airlines, banks, restaurants or stores and receive automated responses. Facebook Inc., Microsoft Corp., IBM and Tencent each held events this year centered around promoting their bot-related initiatives to software makers. Twitter Inc. introduced chatbot-like functions with Pizza Hut and other brands on Tuesday to field customer service inquiries.
Many are betting these tools will soon be everywhere, with bot avatars for pop stars and mom-and-pop shops. (The band Kiss already has one.) For that bot-filled future to unfold, several startups are hoping to enable anyone—not just software developers—to build a bot.
The latest is Octane AI, which raised $1.5 million from General Catalyst and other investors. It joins Chatfuel, Olabot and Motion.ai, all of which have either raised money or rolled out their
DIY-chatbot tools in the past year. They let people choose from a list of
basic commands and edit scripted
responses. Some generate revenue through subscriptions.
The race among these startups heated up in April, when Facebook made chatbots available to Messenger’s billion-plus users. Facebook has said there are more than 30,000 chatbots available through its app. In September, Google bought Api.ai, a service that helps developers build bots.
Making chatbots accessible to people who can’t code “is going to be a way a lot of businesses end up building their first few bots,†said Phil Libin, a partner at General Catalyst. He compared these nascent bot-building tools with Squarespace Inc. or Wix.com Ltd., which make it easy to build a website.
The chatbots you can create with these services are fairly rudimentary. If the bot sees a word or phrase it doesn’t recognize or doesn’t have an answer for, the conversation hits a dead end.