Comment by nagarjun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nagarjun | Hacker News Reader

Underneath the original "wow factor", I think bots have a glaring UX problem. Developers just haven't figured out the real use-case for bots. In some ways, I think this current bot-craze is very similar to what happened with smartwatches 2 years ago. Simply cramming a phone app into a watch doesn't make it magically awesome or useful.

I think a lot of developers seem to be taking the same approach with bots. They are trying to create alternative UIs for their already existing mobile apps through bots. Mobile / web apps do a lot of the same stuff as bots in a much more user-friendly way. Take a look at https://storebot.me/ and tell me if there's one bot that can do something better than a mobile app.

I'm not anti-bot but I just think the bot-frenzy is premature,

I developed a game solely as a Telegram bot: https://storebot.me/bot/mrw_bot

I think that this is a better platform than mobile as it supports multiple devices, user accounts are already setup, it's easy to test and it has built in notifications.

One thing I did have an issue with, is showcasing what it's features were. One option is to create a lot of videos and screenshots which would take a lot of time. As further improvements were made, I would have to reshoot the videos.

Instead, I created a React component to simulate interactions with a bot. The React component is here: http://sevenleaps.github.io/chat-template/

The website for the bot is: http://www.mrwgame.com/

Nice! Yeah I think it has potential for specific kinds of applications. Text-based games are a definite yes. I couldn't agree more with your point about user education. I know a lot of friends who don't even know all the amazing things Google Now can do just because there is not interface to explain all the features. Siri has a "what can you do?" feature but even then, it's very limited. It will be interesting to see what developers and UX professionals do to improve the state of bots.

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