Re:Telegram to award grants to bot developers
by Shoot_The_Moon on Tuesday April 19, 2016 @05:18AM
(#11525786)
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/
Re:Telegram to award grants to bot developers
by nagarjun on Tuesday April 19, 2016 @08:12AM
(#11526375)
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.
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,