What Is a Bot? What Are the Types of Bots?

A bot, a web robot, robot, or simply bot, is a software application that operates on the Internet and performs repetitive tasks. While some bot traffic is from good bots, bad bots can have a huge negative impact on a website or application. Nowadays chatbot trends are increasing because the bots respond very fast to customer/ visitors' queries and can answer repetitive questions(FAQs) and gather important information from customers/visitors and increase the conversion of visitors' into regular customers and satisfy your returning customer.

Types of chatbot: 

1. Messaging chatbot and Internet Relay Chat (IRC): Some bots communicate with users of online-based services, via Instant Messaging (IM), Internet Relay Chat (IRC), or other web interfaces such as Facebook Bots and Twitter Bots, WhatsApp bots, WeChat bot, etc. These chatbots enable users to ask queries and then formulate a response. Such bots can often handle tasks like Promotion of product or service on your messenger and answering FAQs about the products.

2. Social Media bots: Social networking bots are sets of bots that take on the duties of repetitive sets of instructions in order to establish a service or connection among social networking users. Among the various designs of networking bots, the most common are chat bots, algorithms designed to converse with a human user, and social bots are designed to mimic human behaviors to converse with patterns similar to those of a human user. 

3. Commercial bots: Chatbots that are design users on commercial websites to interact with customers or resolve customers' queries. and promote their product. From 2016, when Facebook Messenger allowed developers to place chatbots on their platform, there has been an exponential growth of their use on that forum alone. 30,000 bots were created for Messenger in the first six months, rising to 100,000 by September 2017. It is evident from the use of their chat bot building platform pointed to a near future saving of millions of hours of human labor as 'live chat' on websites was replaced with bots

4. Malicious bots: A malicious use of bots is the coordination and operation of an automated attack on networked computers, such as a denial-of-service attack by a botnet. Internet bots or web bots can also be used to commit click fraud and more recently have appeared around MMORPG games, like computer game bots. Nowadays this kind of bots is also being used in video games such as PUBG. PUBG mobile bots are also related to the family of malicious bots. Another category is represented by Spambots, internet bots that attempt to spam large amounts of content on the Internet, usually adding advertising links. More than 94.2% of websites have experienced a bot attack

5. Helpful bots: The interaction between humans and social robots is very common in day-to-day life, such as in schools, workplaces, video games, and social media. There are several advantages to using bots. Bots are always available, thus providing quick and convenient customer service. Bots can be used for multiple purposes, such as chatting/answering questions and advertising. Bots also reduce labor costs, which in turn produces more profit for the company.