The quiet revolution that is happening across the globe has come to India too. Messaging platform Gupshup announced the launch of its bot builder platform gupshup.io. It aims to support developers throughout the entire lifecycle of developing a bot. This includes testing, deployment, hosting, publishing, monitoring, tracking along with searching and discovering other bots used by consumer businesses. Says Beerud Sheth, founder and CEO, Gupshup: Almost anything that you do on websites can now be done on bots.
The bots – software which automates things that most people do on their own such as check news, order food, book flights and arrange meetings – use a messaging platform to provide you any information. The beauty of bots is that you can do anything – check the weather update, order a pizza, book an airline ticket – using the same messaging service. The action has picked up after Facebook announced the entry of bots via its Messenger platform at its annual F8 developer conference.
Gupshup’s messaging platform is reportedly used by 30,000 businesses including FlipKart, OLA, Facebook, Twitter, ICICI, HDFC and ZeeTV. The ubiquity that bots offer means that almost any business would want its own a bot. Right now, while companies are working on the payments bot, Bengaluru-based Magic X has launched its recharge and bill payment bot. It’s still early days, but the pace at which change is happening, in the not-too-distant future, there will be no need to download an app for getting things done. It will all be a messaging world.
As messaging apps are opening up their APIs to build bots, India is in the right place thanks to a well established developer ecosystem. Sheth articulates that bots are the next wave of the tech revolution after desktops (1990s), browsers and websites (2000s) and applications (mid-2000s). In the changing world every business would need to have a bot strategy quickly.
