What are Bots?

Bots are digital service apps or programs that run automated tasks over the internet. Bots can serve a variety of functions, including providing users with an interface to another program, retrieving data from the web, and acting as a personal assistant by responding to voice commands or other user triggers. Bots are currently being used for many purposes including customer support on e-commerce sites, social media marketing, content generation for websites and blogs, improving search engine rankings through "search engine optimization", and even writing music! While bots have been around for several years now, they've only recently started to see significant adoption due in part to advances in natural language processing technology.

Bot-building topics include machine learning, natural language processing, and deep learning. These articles cover the topics needed to build a chatbot or virtual agent.