Chat app Kik launches a bot store and anyone can make bots for it

When we’ve got our noses poked into smartphones for hours each day, it’s hard to believe that apps are starting to hit the end of the road. Yet studies consistently show that smartphone users have condensed their daily screentime time into just a handful of favourite apps, often a browser, a couple of chat and social apps and maybe a game or two. Sanghoon Park, a University of South Florida professor of teaching and learning, incorporates technology into his courses like a motivational chat bot called RAMI. But they were one-way only, whereas bots can be added to conversations — if you want to pull up the weather while discussing a trip, for example —  as well as one-on-one chats, and a whole lot more. In 2014, Kik it allowed selected brands to pay to develop broadcast bot accounts that could chat with users and serve up things like content or fashion recommendations. These accounts allowed brands — and particularly those in entertainment — to interact with users in an app they use daily and on an opt-in basis, potentially helping to forge a meaningful connection.

A new app rush

With less room for bots to jump in where humans cannot, the challenge for businesses on WeChat is to reply to customers within a few seconds of their first enquiry, with 12 seconds being the target, according to Schorr. Chat bots are becoming all the rage in online customer service, however, before boarding the bot boat, there are several perspectives companies should consider. “Unlike app fatigue, developing a bot makes sense because they can sit in a user’s contact list until they need them. So we think there will be a core set of bots that users will interact with, and a small set of core bots that live in conversations,” Roberts said. “It’s hard to say what the total number of bots users typical have will be,” he said. “We think this is another app store opportunity, but we want to grow carefully with the right kind of bots.

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Bots are applications that are designed to respond to conversational language. The aim is to create services — whether that’s the ability to order a pizza or to enter a meeting in a calendar — where the dialogue with the app is as natural and apparently unscripted as an interaction you might have with a human. Put your brand in front of 10,000+ tech and VC leaders across all three days of Disrupt 2025. Amplify your reach, spark real connections, and lead the innovation charge. The first few chat bots have settled into Facebook Messenger this week, but an army of the artificially intelligent helpers are on the way with a plan to change the way you get information, order food, shop and even stay entertained. Chat bots were one of the focal points of Facebook’s annual F8 developer’s conference this week in San Francisco.

Maybe we just want to get things done without having to do much talking at all. But one reason this works so well is that Google limits the scope of its tool. For each message, the service offers not just one reply but three, letting you choose the reply that best suits what you want to say, and these replies are typically just a few words long.

• Professors of online classes, like Park, are at a disadvantage when it comes to immediate motivational support because they don’t see the students physically disengage with facial expressions or body language.
• They can learn to recognize a cat by analyzing millions of cat photos.
• In the future, the chat bot could also use IBM’s Watson AlchemyLanguage capability to understand how a customer is feeling and then change its tone and actions accordingly.
• Talk about a bot search engine has included partners like Slack and Facebook Messenger, Cheng said.
• It allows you to create a bot of yourself, which interacts and talks to your friends like you but without you having to do so.

Most students either have trouble understanding the course material, don’t see the relevance of their coursework to their career goals or don’t find it personally interesting. How these Kik users react, and how developers use these tools to move things forward are the crucial elements here. Roberts expects brands to be particularly keen to translate their experiences to bots. Bots can either be viewed by individual platform or as an aggregate to display the best bots from all five bot platforms. The assistance is limited to two visas right now (B-2 extensions for business and travel, O-1 for exceptional individuals), but the plan is to extend it to H-1B and L-1 skilled worker visas.

The resulting product, while limited so far, offers a glimpse of Messenger’s evolving potential for news organizations, particularly small ones. Once users get through those initial prompts, someone from Civil Beat itself is able take over and field the user’s question or comment. Since then, ChatGPT has gained millions of users who turn to the chatbot for everything from routine web searches to guidance on how to give a friend career advice. Rivals, including Meta AI, Google’s Gemini, and DeepSeek, have also sprung up. « Several functions are going to get a lot more efficient, » he says.

One official account on the app, called Chumen Wenwen, is a digital assistant bot that acts like Google Now or Siri, which WeChat users can access to book flights or hotels. The developer behind @my_ali_bot, which lets you browse products on Chinese e-commerce site MyAliExpress on Telegram, says it took him a week to build the bot, which had about 38,000 users in January. Park also hopes to collaborate with other faculty members to learn how different disciplines interact with RAMI and how their individual coursework needs promote unique motivational strategies. While most students face the same motivational issues, the practical application may look different for a STEM major versus humanities major.

Rather than force consumers to stop what they’re doing and open a new app, chat bots allow companies to inject themselves into the places where people are already communicating. Instead of stopping to wait, download, and install an app (let alone find that app in the first place), users can call an Uber or schedule a meeting without disrupting the flow of their current conversations. This seamless experience puts services in reach of the many people who wouldn’t bother to visit the App Store.

Finally, there’s no shame in saying that “Dot” is a bot and not a human. Tech savvy people who are long accustomed to typing “/giphy lol” into Slack won’t be blown away by Kik’s bots, but that’s not really the point. Few of Kik’s hardcore users will be familiar with Telegram, Slack or others apps that are at the same stage of their botvolution as Kik. “We’re working with lots of partners… it sounds easy to get started but we are all figuring out what the UX will be like. It’s taken a long time for mobile apps, it’s been eight years since the iPhone launched, and we are still figuring that out, too,” Roberts added. There aren’t too many examples of bots in the market right now, although Facebook is hotly tipped to throw its hat into the ring at F8.

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Currently, privacy-focused Telegram and fast-growing work chat app Slack are the highest profile services that feature bots, but neither has a particular stronghold among the youth, a demographic that is hotly sought after by brands. In December, the online service introduced a test version of an « interactive agent » or programmed chat « buddy » called ZoeOnAOL. AIM users can add Zoe’s name to their buddy list in order to get answers to questions such as « What is the weather in San Francisco? » or simply « Weather 94105, » or to call up stock quotes.

If bots are going to replace any positions of employment it won’t happen any time soon, even in areas like remote customer service, where Facebook is encouraging businesses to use bots. The way fans interact with celebrities is changing, says Eval Pfeifel, co-founder of the Israeli startup Imperson which creates bots for popular characters like Miss Piggy to chat with users on Facebook Messenger. « I’m sure that in the future we will probably do actual celebrities. » Pfeifel has already tried simulating a few famous actors with bots and found his test group enjoyed talking to them. « Fans don’t want to suspend their belief. They want to believe it’s a real person. » This is a speculative one, but organizations and celebrities who pay people to man their Twitter feeds and Instagram accounts, could soon rely on bots as the new creative engines for interesting things to post. One bot developer suggested to me that bots could present a series of possible statements to say on Twitter, for instance, leaving human social media agents to simply choose which was best.