Kik's new Bot Store opens on Tuesday with three categories – entertainment, lifestyle and games – and 16 introductory bots for everything from shopping to searching for animated GIFs.
Kik Interactive of Waterloo, Ont., is the latest tech company to expand its effort to become a platform for third-party bot makers in recent weeks.
The chat app's new Bot Shop opened on Tuesday with three categories – entertainment, lifestyle and games – and 16 introductory bots for everything from shopping to searching for animated GIFs. Kik also announced partnerships with three software development companies that will help convert apps to bots or help brands build new ones.
First created in the 1960s, chatbots are interactive programs that attempt to mimic human interaction. Users can ask questions or select from a list of options, and a robot responds with answers, information, product suggestions, photos, GIFs or anything else a developer creates.
Chief executive officer Ted Livingston has been forecasting the arrival of more complex and full-featured bots in media interviews, but concrete details had been scarce.
"We think this is the browser moment for mobile. We think messengers are the new browser and bots are the new websites," said Michael Roberts, head of messenger at Kik, which has 275 million registered users and is particularly popular among U.S. teens (the company says some 40 per cent of them use Kik). Messengers such as Kik allow users to exchange text, photos and video in real time.
Kik's moves follow last week's major set of announcements by Microsoft Corp., which included the release of 22 new application program interfaces to help software makers build artificially intelligent chatbots and opening its Skype platform up to bot makers.
"Investing deeply and building great developer tools is great for everyone. [Microsoft's] bot announcement is really great for this burgeoning industry," Mr. Roberts said in an interview. Kik has partnered with Microsoft on bot projects, including the artificially intelligent teen-speak-mimicking racist disaster known as Tay.
"[Microsoft] weren't playing favourites with their own platform; the messaging experience is becoming so ubiquitous as an interface it's just good for bots to live everywhere," Mr. Roberts added.
Kik has had a less interactive version of bots called Promoted Chats since 2014, some of which were often little more than cleverly repackaged advertising messages. Still, those bots compelled 18 million users to exchange more than one billion messages with the promoted chatbots.
"This new bots platform is about quick interactions, being able to ask and interact with bots, creating an actual app inside a messenger," Mr. Roberts said. The new bots include a Vine video search bot, video mash-up app ClipDisBot, and some more utilitarian types like the Weather Channel's bot or the H&M bot that builds a style profile through a chat interface.
Research from eMarketer suggests 1.4 billion people used a chat app in 2015. Research from Pervasive group suggests Kik's teen users spend about 75 minutes a day in the app.
Shane Dingman