Life with software bots

Imagine a world where you talk to a bot to have various tasks done. Oh wait! We are already in that world. When you visit some website, a chatbot may pop up and greet you saying “Hello, how may I help you?”; and then you can have a conversation with it to find the information you need or get assistance. On your phones, there are AIs that can understand your speech, have actual dialogues with you and take care of various tasks for you. These are software bots or bots for short.

Software bots come in many shapes and sizes. Some are just simple chatbots that have conversations with you through texts and have limited capabilities. Others, like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, can have verbal conversations with you, read your email, call people, book tickets etc. The authors of Software Bots (2018, IEEE software. [Online] 35 (1), 18–23) describe different types of bots by their purpose, by their intelligence and by how users can interact with them.

Bots are created for a purpose. Bots such as Siri or Cortana can perform a wide range of tasks with very advanced intelligence. A large number of existing software bots are not generalists like Siri or Cortana. Some bots only perform specific actions on behalf of the user (transactional bots), some only fetch information and answer questions (information bots). There are also bots with more work-oriented purposes like productivity bots and collaboration bots. These bots’ main purpose is to facilitate individual human work life or collaboration between many parties (not all of them necessarily being humans).

All bots have some form of intelligence, from simple logic to advanced artificial intelligence. This greatly influences how they interact and integrate with human life. Some bots can only understand simple textual commands and perform rigid tasks accordingly. Other more advanced bots can actually understand human speech. To cooperate with humans, bots not only have to understand humans but also have to understand their environments. Many advanced bots, like Siri and Alexa, are aware of ongoing situations through your email, calendar, the weather data etc. Other simple bots, like the usual support chatbots, actively greet users prompting them for a conversation and are only aware of the information the user input. Different bots may also have different work environments, which greatly influences how the bot-human interaction is initiated. In some situations bots are only activated by some special commands such as “Hey Siri!”. In other situations, bots can become active based on previous interactions, for example, the AI on your phone can wake you up with a greeting or remind you of your incoming appointments. 

Bots are present almost anywhere software can be applied. But they did not just come to life on their own, someone created them; they are, after all, just software. Today, anyone with adequate knowledge can create a software bot. There are software libraries aimed specifically at the creation of new bots. This is very typical of the software development world: you can make software to help you make software. Usually, after a bot is created, it is not automatically integrated into human life, users have to choose to use them. Siri is only available on Apple phones. Cortana is only available on Windows machines. And even when they are available, most bots have to be installed, enabled, given permission to start functioning with humans.

Software bots are a very specific type of software that blurs the “hard boundary” previously present in human-machine interaction. They are already doing this everyday in today’s world, albeit at a very early and developing stage. Some computer scientists offer their insights in the face of the increasing adoption of software bots. We should use bots carefully. Bots should not replace but facilitate and enhance human-to-human interaction. We should also be careful in making bots. Since bots blur the human-machine boundary, users should always know what to expect when interacting with a bot. Bots should always make the user aware of whether they are interacting with a bot or with other humans. And depending on their purpose, bots should have the appropriate design and personality to best facilitate user interaction. Finally, bots should do no harm. It is wise to consider the safety and ethics of software bots before we use them too pervasively.

Lebeuf, C. et al. (2018) Software Bots. IEEE software. [Online] 35 (1), 18–23.