Humans are optional: bots can now gang up on their own to become superbots

Photo credit: Pixabay.

Think of it as a Slack for bots. A hangout where an ecommerce shopping bot could chat with hundreds of merchant bots to figure out where to get the cheapest iPhone 7, and even negotiate its price. Or a group of bots could play a game of poker in minutes to earn points or money for their owners. A brand could have multiple bots working together to respond to a customer query.

That’s Interbot, a fortnight-old channel where bots can talk to one another and collaborate.

Soon there will be over a million bots. Imagine what they can do if they collaborate.

We’re getting used to encountering bots in messaging apps and business websites. And although they often suck at communicating with humans, they’re getting better at it with advances in natural language processing. But bot-to-bot communication is a new paradigm.

It’s the latest from the stable of Beerud Sheth, founder of Elance and Gupshup.

Beerud has been dabbling in bots for years, long before they became a buzzword. His company, Gupshup, based in Silicon Valley and Mumbai, provides tools and services to build bots and connects them to multiple channels.

Some time back, Beerud’s preoccupation shifted from building more and more advanced bots to getting bots to collaborate with one another to offer more powerful capabilities. This led to the creation of Interbot.

“Bots have massive ability to process information, and many bots are proving highly effective in multiple domains, from banking and ecommerce to customer engagement for enterprises,” Beerud tells Tech in Asia. “Soon there will be over a million bots. Imagine what they can do if they collaborate. We have created a channel to enable this and hope to make it a standard for interoperability between bots.”

Masterbots and minion bots

GIF source: GIPHY

The artificially intelligent Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Facebook M (currently being rolled out) already have the capability to redirect queries to other bots to fetch requirements for anything from booking a ride to making a payment. In that sense, they act as masterbots with minion bots at their service. But this is restricted to bots that the Google, Amazon, or Facebook masterbot chooses to work with.

What Interbot has done is to create a channel where anybody can publish a bot in minutes – just like they would do on a channel like Facebook Messenger or Telegram to interact with humans. It will handle the messaging protocols between bots, as well as provide the context to help the bots figure which message relates to what.

Once published on Interbot, a bot can start chatting and collaborating with the other bots on the channel. Many more masterbots can emerge in this open space for different purposes, instead of just a handful from the tech giants.

Chicken-and-egg question

Doing away with pesky API calls

Bot clutter

The devil is in the details

From Elance to Interbot